Dr Nadya Yakovchuk
About
Biography
Nadya joined the Doctoral College in 2019, having worked at the University of Surrey since 2009 in a number of roles, primarily as a Learning Development Adviser and a Teaching Fellow in Higher Education. She holds a BEd and an MEd from the Belarusian State Pedagogical University, and an MA and a PhD in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching from the University of Warwick, UK.
From 2002, Nadya has worked at a number of UK universities (Warwick, Leicester, QMUL, the Open University and Surrey), teaching mainly in the areas of writing and academic skills development, linguistics and English for Academic Purposes, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. She has also worked on various research projects, with the most recent ones exploring academic developers’ writing identities and the experiences of PhD students in writing confirmation reports and participating in the confirmation viva.
Nadya is a regular presenter at international writing conferences and she has published articles and book chapters on different aspects of academic writing. She co-edited Enhancing Student-Centred Teaching in Higher Education - The Landscape of Student-Staff Research Partnerships (published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020) and guest edited a special issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education (https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss31/). Between 2019 and 2022, Nadya was a participant of the multi-institutional research project coordinated by the Centre for Engaged Learning at Elon University, USA, that explored writing transfer between academic and professional settings.
Nadya’s particular interests lie in the areas of writing and knowledge construction in the disciplines, genre-based writing pedagogy, writing transfer, academic writers’ identity and authorial voice, and corpus linguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics applications in the teaching of academic writing.
Publications
The continuing advancement of electronic technology poses increasing challenges for ensuring authenticity in student academic work. Along with important changes to academic practice proposed within the holistic framework of addressing plagiarism (Carroll and Appleton, 2001; Carroll, 2002), a more global change to academic culture as a whole might be overdue, a change that would safeguard student (and staff) adherence to core academic values irrespective of advances in information technology and sophistication of information handling tools.
At the 2006 JISC Second International Plagiarism Conference, the focus among the academic community was clearly on moving towards a culture of academic integrity, which implies a positive representation of the ideas behind the avoidance of plagiarism, and an institution-wide emphasis on upholding these principles and promoting good academic practice.
The US honour code model might provide useful pointers as to how the transition towards a culture of academic integrity can be implemented. This model seems to offer a viable alternative to more traditional top-down approaches to ensuring proper academic practice among students.
So far, the research-grounded UK response to the idea of honour codes has been very limited. This paper reports on a recent cross-institutional study undertaken at the University of Leicester, whose purpose was to explore staff and student attitudes to the concept of academic integrity and the elements of the US honour code system, and to elicit participants’ views on the feasibility of applying this system in the UK setting.
Effective plagiarism detection is one of the pillars of the holistic approach to addressing plagiarism. Specialised electronic detection software that can assess the degree of textual similarity of a piece of writing against a database of sources has been steadily gaining in popularity in recent years. Although electronic tools such as Turnitin UK offer wide scope of opportunity with regard to systematic screening of student work, they have built-in restrictions which do not allow them to serve as a ‘panacea’ for plagiarism identification.
This paper draws on a study of plagiaristic practices of undergraduate students at the University of Warwick, UK, and presents a Plagiarism Identification Framework developed in the course of this study. The elements of the Framework are described and the results of its application to student writing are presented, with reference to the Turnitin UK output received for the same samples of student writing. The paper considers the strengths and limitations of the two procedures for identifying plagiarism and discusses pedagogical implications of the proposed Plagiarism Identification Framework for EAP and subject tutors.
Honour code systems have been long-established in some American universities, associated with cultures of academic integrity. This study considers the perceptions of students and staff, elicited through focus groups and electronic voting, in one UK higher education institution regarding the potential for implementation of these systems in the UK. Whilst the main principles of honour codes were broadly welcomed, implementation in the UK higher education context was perceived as problematic. Although both staff and students saw educational benefits in increased student involvement in the promotion of academic integrity and good academic practice, there was a tension between staff who would like to increase the responsibilities of students and the reality of the students' seeming lack of confidence in their ability to discharge those responsibilities. The introduction of students as participants in plagiarism hearing panels and processes was tentatively supported, potentially offering a route to break down the staff-student dichotomy