BC TEAL 2026 Annual Conference

When carrying out written assignments, university and college students are on safe ground with journal articles. These have been peer-reviewed and are generally trustworthy. However, much of the information they uncover in the course of their research will be less reliable. This session addresses the other information students might come across, namely websites and non-academic articles. Attention is also given to visual input, specifically photographs.
The session provides guidance on how to approach this material critically and thereby develop media literacy. Specifically, delegates will be shown the kinds of questions they can encourage their students to ask about non-academic materials. A systematic approach to these materials will equip students to evaluate this input effectively, and to determine whether or not it can be used as a source for written tasks in academic courses.
There are over 1.5 billion websites in the world, and while some are reliable, many are not. The CRAAP test (currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose) enables consumers of web material to approach it critically and determine its usefulness. Non-academic articles, such as magazine stories and personal blogs, often rely on anecdotes to make a point. It is helpful to examine the use of language in these stories and to consider how language may be used to manipulate the reader’s thoughts. Questions about photographs will explore how an image might be used to evoke a specific reaction. 
In all cases, examples will be provided, and suggestions for class activities will be shared. Delegates should come away from this session with ideas for activities they can adapt for their own classes to encourage critical thinking and media literacy, and to help their EAP students to become better consumers of the information they may encounter. Examples are from the second edition of Critical Reading (TC Media ELT, 2026).  

Plagiarism has become a serious concern globally, especially with the rise of GenAI tools enabling AI-generated plagiarism, called AIgiarism (Tang, 2024). Indeed, plagiarism has been redefined as presenting the words or ideas of another person, or those generated by artificial intelligence, without reference to the source, for an advantage in an evaluation context (Peters, 2023). L2 students often resort to GenAI tools to compensate for their underdeveloped language proficiency. While universities have developed academic integrity guidelines, instructors seek practical strategies to prevent, not just respond to, plagiarism (Liu, 2025). Yet, research on preventing plagiarism remains limited (Eaton, 2020; Gustilo et al., 2024; Scurr, 2025; Sopcak & Hood, 2022). Thus, this presentation reports on an original study exploring university instructors' strategies to prevent student plagiarism.
To pool the wisdom of university instructors on their perceptions of plagiarism prevention, the study draws on individual semi-structured qualitative interviews with 59 instructors in North America and Europe, collected through an international research partnership in 2023-2024 and analyzed using NVivo 15. By employing a grounded theory approach to gain a data-driven perspective (Corbin & Strauss, 2008), the researchers adopted an inductive method to select relevant excerpts, code them into themes, and categorize the themes into structured groups. Based on the analysis, the report shares 30 selected plagiarism prevention strategies aligned with different stages of the student writing process. Examples include positive instruction first, “deplagiarization” demonstrations, multi-layered assignments, progress checks via Google Docs, interactive conferences, and “share chat” links. Session participants leave with actionable takeaways.