Abstract:
This research had two main purposes: (1) to examine perceptions of plagiarism among undergraduate English major students at a university in the Eastern region of Thailand, and (2) to explore occurrence of plagiarism found in students writings. The participants were seventy-nine fourth-year undergraduate students, of which twenty-five were male and fifty-four were female. A plagiarism questionnaire, which was adopted from Rezanejad and Rezaei (2013), was used for collecting the data and descriptive statistics used mode for data analysis of the perception levels of all participants. The Turnitin program was used to identify the percentage of plagiarism in English project writing relating to topics selected by the participants. The results showed that the perceptions of plagiarism of all participants were at the medium level and there were seven types of plagiarism in the participants writing, including Clone (82.65%), CTRL-C (53.65%), Find-Replace (36.25%), Recycle (15.95%), Remix (13.05%), Hybrid (7.25%), and Aggregator (1.45%). The conclusion of this study is that it would be beneficial for the students writing and general academic progress if they became more aware of what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it. The implication of the study is that if the students have a better understanding of academic dishonesty, they can avoid plagiarism and strengthen their academic writing with correct citations and references. Therefore, teachers have a key role to play in educating students to prevent plagiarism.