A lot of researchers have stressed the impact of academic advising on students' retention, academic success, and satisfaction (

Academicians consider plagiarism a major threat to academia. To combat that threat, a lot of universities, including the researcher's university, have been using Turnitin. It is believed that this software is likely to deter students' plagiarism. The aim of this study is, therefore, to investigate 1) the impact of Turnitin on students' plagiarism from the perspectives of both students and instructors in a private Lebanese English-speaking university and 2) the reasons that push students to plagiarize. A concurrent mixed-methods design is employed, and different data collection methods are used. The data are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Findings reveal that although a lot of the participants perceive Turnitin as a good deterrent to plagiarism, it did not completely inhibit it. The findings also reveal that not all instructors were committed enough to use Turnitin in their courses. Some of the reasons for plagiarism that the participants named are lack of citation skills, laziness, and indifference among students to abide by ethical writing norms. Besides reinforcing the use of Turnitin among all instructors, the researcher recommends that students' writing and citation skills be improved and that students be helped to become more ethical writers.

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In this globalized world, graduating students with intercultural communicative competence (ICC) becomes essential (Saba 'Ayon & Harb, 2022;Winstead, 2021). Concerned about the Lebanese graduates, the researchers in this follow-up study aimed to investigate the extent to which Lebanese private university students have the knowledge, attitudes, skills and critical cultural awareness of an intercultural speaker as per Byram's (1997) multidimensional model of ICC. Using a mixed-methods design, the researchers employed an online self-completion questionnaire emailed to 190 conveniently selected private university students in Lebanon and three focus groups to collect their quantitative and qualitative data. The researchers analyzed the collected data quantitatively and qualitatively. Conclusions of both types of analyses were triangulated. Major findings reveal that most of the respondents rank high on four components, namely knowledge, attitude, skills of interpreting and relating and critical cultural awareness, and moderate on one component of Byram's ICC model, which is the skills of discovery and interaction. Major recommendations were made, among which was incorporating ICC within the Lebanese educational system.

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