One of the most
frustrating things you face when you teach English is seeing students
plagiarise. The irony, however, is that plagiarism might be
underestimated as a technique when considering what happens in some
classrooms. But first, let's stop and ask, what is plagiarism? What
do you need to be able to plagiarise? Some skills are surely
involved. One skill that comes to mind is the ability to use a search
engine as a tool for research on a given topic. As minor as it may
sound, it's still considered a skill. A plagiariser is usually
expected to use the search engine for its primary purpose: to search
for information. What skills are required in this action of
searching? I would say at least, the ability to select (hopefully
critically) information from a specific source and not the other. The
plagiariser chooses that specific piece of writing over the other to
'steal' because they can see that perhaps it is the most relevant to
their topic or the closest to their linguistic abilities. Even though
they are misused, those are still skills. In other words, regardless
of the obvious fact that this is still considered an academic offence,
there is nevertheless, a certain level of critical thinking in the process.
What is happening in many
English classrooms in Oman is beyond horrific, though. And I mean
horrific in the sense that not much critical thinking is involved in
their plagiarism style. If many of them are going to abuse academic
integrity anyway, then to my horror, I at
least wish that they'd do it with some element of critical thinking. At
least, I might be relieved to know that their researching ability
is alright and that they can actually critically select
what they want to 'steal'.
Yet unsurprisingly,
whenever there is a writing task in an English class, I see uneasy
faces. It's not difficult to understand where their frustration comes from, since many
public schools graduates
that are enrolled in higher education are much below standard in both
English and study skills. They struggle, and that's understandable.
Yet the big challenge in many Omani classrooms is to get the students
to feel motivated enough to work hard and submit a genuine piece of
work regardless of the kind and number of mistakes in it. What many of
them fail to realise, is that they're in a classroom to actually
learn and not just gain points in a competition to go on to the next
level. It may sound uneasy for some, but if we don't accept that we
have gaps that need to be filled or rather amended, our education
system would keep running out of breath while trying to catch up with
the better educational systems around the world. Hence, we will never be
satisfied with the standard of public schools graduates.
I started my post with a
rather strange appreciation of the skills needed to plagiarise. The
reason is because a lot of students do not even bother about
all skills mentioned. So if they don't use those skills and they
don't produce their authentic work, then what do they do? They simply
go to this tool which was created for great purposes, none of which I
am sure is to help students cheat:
www.translate.google.com
. They simply paste their Arabic text in there and get a ready made
piece of writing in English.
The messily-translated
chunks of language submitted can be outrageous but hilarious at the
same time. And I say it's messy because as a machine translator it
translates things literally in terms of meaning and discards any
grammatical rules of the second language most of the time; it simply
follows the word order of the translated language. The effect, my
respected readers, can be speechless, as you realise. One student for
instance, typed all the Arabic he wanted to express and clicked to
translate it into English. Apparently the student wanted to translate
the word 'feather' (singular) to English. Note that the Arabic word
for feather and badminton (the sport) is the same. The student ended
up submitting something that is along the lines of 'the badminton of
the bird'...which is interesting if you think about it; but maybe in a
fictional text rather than non-fictional prose?
I pause and take a deep
breath while I mentally try to convince myself that these mistakes
are interesting according to the descriptivist views of linguistics
(it's a survival mechanism). Can it get
any worse? Until this plague ends and this will only happen once
treated from its very roots, I'll keep scribbling with my red pen on
students' work a big O and a slash that crosses between two small
circles to signify: 0%.
