Misguided plagiarism phobia - is it a thing? (mainly related to difficulties in understanding English) I'm an enthusiastic contributor to one or two sites that help learners of English. I've noticed a problem that crops up again and again.
Many non-native speakers of English make efforts to disguise a quotation that they haven't understood when asking for help with its meaning.
I suspect this is because they have had it drilled into them that plagiarism is a deadly sin (which it is of course).
What they don't appear to realise is that a correct quotation with a proper attribution to the original author is good practice.
Perhaps none of this would matter but for the fact that their attempt to rewrite a sentence that they already don't understand, usually ends up so mangled as to be incomprehensible. (I don't want to single anyone out but if it's vital to the discussion I could provide a link to such a question)
In my experience this practice is common amongst students of whatever discipline who haven't understood a particular phrase when reading a text-book or academic paper.
Question
I can't imagine I'm the only one to have noticed this. Is it a phenomenon that is recognised by teachers in general? If so what do you do about it? Better still, is there a way to propagate the distinction between copying and quoting so that teachers world-wide are not misleading their students?

Example
I have invented an example for the sake of clarity.

The student submits the following question to English Language Stack
Exchange:
How can I use the expression &quot;distant type&quot;?
I saw a friend write the sentence, &quot;X got bigger because of distant type Y&quot;
What does this mean? How can I use it?

On investigation it turns out that the original was

&quot;... obtained results suggesting a totally unexpected acceleration in
the expansion of the universe by using distant type Ia supernovae as
standard candles...&quot;
Accelerating universe From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you think this example is exaggerated, I can assure you it is not. I see this sort of thing all the time.


NOTE
I raised this issue on English Language Meta. The difference is that
there I was explicitly asking about ways to deal with the phenomenon on Stack Exchange. Here I am asking if there is a solution (or even a problem) with regard to academic students when pursuing formal courses. I see this as sufficiently different to justify both questions.
I must agree with chasly. 

I have come from the backgrounds of monastic education in Burma. They have a very different perspective on plagiarism. For these people, quoting an authority on the subject matter is for the sake of learned readers who will not believe an author on his or her own words. Therefore:

1) Even though the quoted text is in Pali, an ancient Buddhist language, translations are usually not provided. For, if you are a learned reader, you are expected to already know Pali.

2) The text is quoted only by title, or sometimes with the chapter title, but page numbers are never given. It means: if you are not learned enough to find out the quoted text on your own, you are not qualified to question the author's words. 

See also the pages (611-617) of the following paper Intellectual Property in Early Buddhism.