Plagiarism means copying someone else's words without giving them credit.  American students are taught from an early age that plagiarism or copying are a serious offense.  Americans learn how to avoid it.  If they do it, and they are caught, they are not surprised when they are punished.

For foreign students, the situation is different.  Sometimes a student copies another student's work (a paper or a test) intentionally.  Maybe this is a more acceptable practice in the student's home country, but here a teacher will get very angry about it, and the student will be punished.  For example, if I receive the same paper from two different students, I give both students zero points, or an F.

Sometimes, a student wants to improve his/her composition so they get "too much help" from a friend or family member on an out-of-class writing assignment.  American teachers also react strongly to this. In any case, getting "too much help"  does not improve your ability to write.  Often a helpful friend or family member who is not a trained language teacher will not know how to "help" except by rewriting your sentence or paragraph.  To avoid this problem, get help from your ESL or English teacher or from another trained teacher in the Writing Lab.

In America, the attitude about copying other people's ideas could be very different from the attitude in your county. In the article What is Plagiarism and Why Do People Do It? (listed below), the first paragraph has some interesting ideas about this.

At City College, students begin to summarize articles and to use acceptable paraphrasing (See the Plagiarism Website below) in Level 52/58.

If you are Level 52/58 or below, you might want to start with these links:

1.  A list of rules about how to summarize

2.  An example of a summary that goes with this article (and a related website below it) from the CNN Website.

3.  You can also go to the CNN website and compare any of the Stories to the Abridged articles.  You can see some examples of how professional writers write summaries.

For Level 62 and up:
 

CNN Article About Plagiarism
http://literacynet.org/cnnsf/plagiarism/storyweek.htm
On the CNN website, you can read this Story of the Week.  It has some interesting links to related website, including the the three websites listed in this section.

The two websites below are intended mostly for American students who are writing research papers, but there is some interesting general information also:

What is Plagiarism and Why Do People Do It?
http://web.calstatela.edu/centers/write_cn/plagiarism.htm
Paragraph One may be of particular interest to ESL students.

Learning Skills Center:  How to Lessen the Chances of Plagiarism
http://quarles.unbc.edu/lsc/rpplagia.html