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.