joogling

This is a word I'm using to describe what appears to the viewer to be similar to juggling sticks that are on fire: using phrases from Google (or wherever) without knowing what they mean; putting pieces of text together without understanding them. It is similar to juggling burning sticks in several ways. First, the phrases could be unrelated to each other, and the joogler might not even know it. This is like a juggler touching the sticks, throwing the sticks, yet not actually feeling the sticks or letting the essence of the burning sticks get anywhere near him/her. Second, since he/she is playing with fire, he/she has the possibility of being burned, or being hurt by the appearance of writing jargon without meaning, being a faker, being a person who has used words without understanding them. Third, after the reader tries to make sense out of these discordant pieces of lifted material, the reader gets angry, heated up, as one would if someone were trying to pass off tripe under one's nose, as a genuine piece of writing.

One of the characteristics of this kind of writing is that serious revision of any kind is very difficult. If the writer lifted it without understanding, or with very flimsy understanding, substantial changing of it very likely will only make the situation worse, and does. I'm finding lots more sentences that are complete, grammatical, jargonish, and absolutely inappropriate for the paragraph that they're in. Sometimes I can find them verbatim by using Google; sometimes I can't. But I get angry either way. How could they make such a perfect yet jargonish sentence, and put it in entirely the wrong place? This isn't writing, it's joogling...

trench warfare

I have students who get the best idea they can about a subject, and then fire away: garbled, somewhat difficult to understand, but genuinely from them, a genuine representation of their thoughts and their grammar. Then, I have students who don't have any idea about the subject, but know how to use Google very well. They know I'll catch them if it's too slick, so they don't steal whole paragraphs at once. They don't even want to steal whole sentences at once (risky), but sometimes they do. Toward the end of the night, they're facing their third body paragraph, or maybe their conclusion, and they copy and paste. Why? They had nothing to say. They had no idea. If it seemed like it held together, would look ok to the teacher, they pasted, printed and ultimately posted.

In many cases I never caught them; I'm still looking (you'll find their papers under their names, in the templates of our highest class weblog)...if I didn't see this so much, I wouldn't be here writing about it. I call it "piecemeal Googling"- the assumption that whole sentences get caught easily, but phrases sometimes fit together well enough for the teacher to assume it was homemade, and that you meant something.

A good question comes up of how I can be sure that this is actually piecemeal copying, as opposed to having ideas, reaching out, finding whole phrases in a dictionary or translator somewhere, and putting them together in accordance with one's ideas. Usually I am able to find the biggest chunk, and match it verbatim with something through Google. Then I know it can't be. But also, occasionally they slip in whole sentences that make no sense at all...and then I realize, they don't even understand, themselves, what they themselves have "written"...

Since I see lack of confidence as the root cause of the problem, I've begun attacking it as such. I have my own system for knowing how much vocabulary they command, how they put together sentences when they literally have no Google to rely on. Working from that end I build their confidence and teach them that they can always have something to say, and that that's always better than copying.

But, they've been copying all their lives. Language learning is copying; they've been copying all their language learning careers. Unlearning something that is so permanently embedded is an interesting process. Kind of like pulling teeth.

slogging

When one grades too many papers, one's mind threatens to turn to mush, but generally, in ESL, plagiarism stands out like a sore thumb, for having an attitude, being smooth, being whole sentences of verbose prose that may or may not fit into the essay in question.

But lately I've encountered some interesting examples. I have students who seem to copy and paste words, and put them together without quite understanding them. They're pretty good at using Google with key words to get to some pretty decent sites. Often the sites say something related or relevant to the issue at hand. Often they copy pieces that are miniscule enough that it slips through the cracks; maybe they've changed a word or two (this is trying, ineffectively, to paraphrase). But sometimes they don't really understand the words, and then the effect is deadly- they are putting together things that make no sense, when combined as a whole.

Sometimes they run their native language through a computer translator. I'm not sure if I would know this kind of mush from another. I'm not even sure this is plagiarism. If they wrote it, and jammed it through a mush-making translator, that's actually quite original.

Sometimes they look through their stock of old papers, that they've written for me or someone else, looking for a sentence that they've gotten away with before. Just say anything that works, and hope the teacher makes the meaning connections and considers it English. But, being poor readers, they are not necessarily even able to read their own old papers. They sometimes give sentences that make no sense (see post below). The mismatch between the sentence and the essay it's in is not only a grammatical mismatch (the plagiarized sentence is far more grammatical) but also a meaning mismatch - how could they put a sentence like this in a paragraph like that?

At this point, it's already too late. They should have learned how to read, when they had the chance. But that's easier said than done, and goes against all their training, in some cases. To unravel their system, one might have to start at the beginning.

I'd like to give specific examples of what happens. Maybe another time. Right now my mind is mush.