TL;DR: Student's new writing practices put them at risk for plagiarism, but it can be helped!

I was having my students practice paraphrasing sentences from an academic article, and so I thought I would make it really meta and have them paraphrase an article about international students paraphrasing.

Here is the paragraph they used which is from page 116 of Introna and Hayes (2011) (which happens to be a very informative article on the issues involved in using plagiarism detection software):

I took the underlined sentence and had them try to paraphrase it. Many of them didn't know the phrasal verb "draw upon" and told me the meaning was to draw and color, so in my head, I was thinking like this:

I had to explain about the old meaning of "draw," which survives in their dresser drawer (not like actually lives in there--it's an old meaning that is fossilized in "dresser drawer").

I can remember when I wrote papers in college, I used the text fragment strategy. Since this is becoming a dominant strategy used by students, rather than viciously cling to the old note card system*, I say go with it and offer these words of caution (if these steps are not followed, there is a BIG risk for accidental plagiarism):

1. When you copy text from another source and paste it into your paper, put quotes around it and add bibliographic citation information IMMEDIATELY  (e.g. author last name and year if using APA). Even if you will paraphrase it later, still put quotes in case you get distracted and forget. Every semester I tell them about how when I was "seventeen and crazy," one time I put the quotes around my source fragments, but I didn't give the bibliographic information (author and page number) since I reasoned that it would take too much time ("I'll go back later and add the citations"). In the end, I spent over 2 hours re-finding all of my source locations. This seems insane to me now, but with my age has come wisdom. Remember, young people are still very smart, but their impatience makes them reckless (am I actually referring to young people as a "them"? Oh dear!).
   
2. Not putting quotation and citation information puts you at risk for plagiarizing because you might forget where the information came from! One of the saddest [#firstworldproblem] things about my seventeen-and-crazy story is that I had to delete some of my quotations because I couldn't find where the page number was (I highlighted it, but I highlighted many other portions of the text).
3. Think of writing your research paper as cleaning your kitchen or house: It will be much more time efficient if you clean up (cite!) as you go.
4. Read over your quotations and consider paraphrasing them (remove the quotation marks but keep the bibliographic information!)
   

For those of you who may not know what Introna and Hayes are talking about with text fragments, I'll give a brief description of how I went about writing my research papers:

1. First, find good quotations.
2. Copy them.
3. Paste them into a document.
4. Add quotation marks.
5. Add bibliographic information (author, date, page)
6. Repeat steps 1-5 until you have "enough" information (this is obviously subjective)
   
7. Begin writing your own ideas and connecting them to the quotations you have added.
8. When the quotations are not particularly striking, keep the citation but change the wording and paraphrase it. I like to keep the quotation and write my paraphrase below it so I can see that it is in fact different from the original.

Regarding Step 7, this is something I recommend for my ESL students. When teaching native speakers, we tell them to read the source, understand it, and then look away from the source and write what can be remembered from the gist of it. This sounds practical, but for a non-native with a less-than-native vocabulary, it may be very difficult to find other words. Many of my good students (read: conscientious and hardworking) who have plagiarized insist they did not copy and paste but that they typed every word. I like to take this at face value and assume the student is actually telling the truth. The most likely explanation (in my mind, anyway): The students have no other vocabulary to "fall back on" so to speak, so along with the idea (the gist), they get the exact wording stuck in their heads, and they cannot separate this idea from the wording. Therefore, I tell my students to stare the source text in the face and write their paraphrase below it until they can SEE that it is using different vocabulary and grammar.

Soon I will write about paraphrase strategies for ESL students since the "read it and then look away and write your summary/paraphrase" strategy does not work for non-natives.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

*Comments on the "Note Card Method": When I was in high school, I was required to use note cards for research papers. I loved my high school English teachers, but I hated this approach. It was incredibly frustrating, time-consuming, and unnecessary. I hope no one still does this.

TL;DR: "Most international students who plagiarize aren't trying to pull one over on their teachers."

I've been dealing with a lot of plagiarism lately (well, actually, I deal with plagiarism in my upper level writing classes all the time). There are a couple of issues that I have seen develop out of my many meetings with students, but for this entry, I'm only going to talk about intentionality.

The often knee-jerk reaction to finding out a student copied several sentences or even a paragraph word-for-word is to become insulted, indignant, even wounded. I went through this a lot in my first years of teaching. I got really upset, and it took a lot out of me.

And then it kept happening.

I had to know why. I revisited my teaching on paraphrase and citation, I looked for better teaching materials, I gossiped around water coolers and read stuff online. Eventually I came across the concept of the word "plagiarism" being too broad. Basically, it includes both the malicious plagiarizers and the clueless/accidental/misunderstanding ones. It really exists more on a continuum:

Obviously, egregious stuff like essay purchasing is clearly malicious, and most students couldn't not know that this would upset their teacher. The trouble is that even stuff that is on the far end (deleting one word out of a sentence or leaving material unquoted) can be committed by very sincere and well-meaning students. Let me share how I know this.

Back in 2009, I remember the Director of Composition requiring students to purchase They Say / I Say with Readings. Her rationale was that ENG 101 was a writing course, and so many students were getting bogged down by having to find good sources for the bibliographic essay that it lead to poorly written papers based on sources that very often were not that good to begin with. By giving them a set of sources to start using, it opened up possibilities I had never thought of:

• Students had more time to read, understand, and write
• Students had easy access to some quality sources
• Since we had access to the source texts, we could better gauge reading comprehension and also paraphrasing ability
  

This last point was very useful to me when I started teaching ESL. What better way to assess students' paraphrasing skills than to have access to all of their sources before they even started writing?

This all ties into a conversation I had on Monday with a coworker who has the same strategy with assigning source texts. She had her students writing annotated bibliographies, and surprise, surprise, some of them were plagiarized.

"It's obviously not malicious. They know that I know all of the sources--so it's not like they're trying to pull one over on me!"

This is the crux of the matter: The high rate of international students plagiarizing cannot all be attributed to deception, especially since it happens even when students are well-meaning and know their teachers cannot be tricked.

-Bill

As a student, I remember being so frustrated when teachers would ask me to explain what I meant about a chapter or story I was referencing. 
"Why? You know the scene I'm talking about."
"But your reader may not know what you're talking about."
"But you're my reader!"
"When I read your essay, I pretend that I have not read the original."

As you can imagine, my fourteen-year-old self was not so happy indeed. And I never got very satisfactory answers to this question, either. My teachers usually pulled the "I'm the Teacher" Card, so I just dutifully did that they told me, albeit begrudgingly. Yet somehow, I still fell in love with Mrs. Strouse, and I decided as a sophomore that I wanted to be an English teacher.

In college, I encountered this same game in virtually every class. Why do teachers pretend not to know things? I became trained in education, and so then I started to pretend not to know things. It's funny because I still didn't really "get" why I should act like this. It wasn't until grad school that the wheels started turning. In my TESOL methods class, when the whole class was given back their exams, I found I had a minus on my essay question and didn't understand why. I answered the prompt very well and gave many concrete examples. The professor then made this comment to the whole class:

"A lot of you lost points because you did not even mention the issues in the prompt in your introduction. Remember, you have to do something to orient readers to the topic you're writing about."

It has only been recently, especially as I've taught many different levels of students, and students in sheltered instruction in particular, that it has begun to dawn on me. I'm teaching an assignment now where students summarize and respond to an article. I've read the article they're writing about, but of course, I pretend that I have not.

"Why?" my students ask me.
"Because this time, I've read what you're writing about, but later on, you'll write a bigger paper with more sources, and I probably haven't read those other sources. I need to make sure you know how to accurately and clearly summarize something in this one assignment before I can trust you with summarizing sources I've never seen before. You need to develop good habits of clearly explaining yourself because eventually you'll get into a situation where your reader has not read what you're writing about, and hopefully by then you'll be able to make good summaries." (this also applies toward how I teach students to avoid plagiarism, which I will write about soon)

Well, I have a stack of papers that I need to go read and pretend I don't know anything about, so I bid you farewell. Have fun with your feigned (and yet pedagogically-sound) amnesia!

-Bill

When I was in college, I remember making a couple misspellings that Microsoft Word's auto-correct would never catch. Someone told me that you could add those misspellings to Word's Proofing Options and then it would catch it. When I looked at it, the mischievous side of me thought, "hey, I could do this on a friend's computer and have a word like 'the' replaced with a word like 'stupid' or 'butt face'... that would be hilarious!" 

Well, long story short, I never had the guts to actually mess with someone like this, but when I became a teacher, I started grading papers digitally and found myself writing the same statements over and over again, despite the fact that each of the students' writing was quite different from one another. I then remembered my idea for a prank and thought I could use it for good!

Here is a picture to give you an idea of how this works. First you open MS Word and click on the icon in the upper left of the window. Then, you click on Word Options at the bottom.

Once you're there, you can go to Proofing, which will open up the following menu (see below).

You want to click on AutoCorrect options, and that will give you a menu like the picture below. If you select a paragraph of text beforehand, then it will automatically populate the field as seen below. For example, I wanted to be able to say: 

In wh-clauses, do not invert the subject and the auxiliary:
Correct: "I didn't know what I should do."
Incorrect: "I didn't know what should I do."

So I typed that into a comment box, selected the text, then went to Word Options --> Proofing --> AutoCorrect Options. I then typed in that I want MS Word to replace "whc" with this paragraph (the code you select doesn't matter, as long as you can remember it--I chose whc for wh-clause). You can see this below:

Anyway, I've found this helps me make digital comments faster if I am grading a set of essays that have the same errors. The best part is that this is entirely customizable, so you can easily remember the codes since you are the one making them, however, since you might be forgetful (like me), then you can create a cheat sheet like this in an another file:

It's funny when I think back to the first time I started grading digitally. It was actually from two reasons: first, the frustration that came from handwriting the exact same statement was too annoying for me, and second, when I would grade revisions, it was difficult to see exactly what the student had changed (if anything--sometimes one additional sentence or a font change would make it hard to follow my previous comments and see if they were taken into account in the revision). Making the comments digitally made it easier to track changes.

Every semester I learn something new about grading digitally, and I'm always looking forward to any new ideas you may be using. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill

I was helping a student review for a proficiency test and a sentence like this came up on a sample test:
"You haven't heard of Mark Twain? He is ______________ one of the most important American writers."
a. being
b. be
c. saying the
d. said to be

I have yet to see a student run into this construction and nail it. Usually they gravitate toward the distractor, which is anything that yields "is VERB-ing," but what they don't realize is that this is a participial adjective construction like the following:

• This medicine is taken for diabetes.
  
• The flowers weren't intended for you.
  
• The poem wasn't written about WWII.
  

I don't know whether to give the test-designers kudos or to curse them for their devious grammatical trickery. At times I see constructions on these tests that seem so exceptionally rare that I question whether there is value in teaching them. In case you're curious, if you search the COCA for

[vb*] [v?n*] to *

you will generate the following list:

So I suppose the construction is not incredibly rare after all (there are even more results if you omit the last wild card). But why does this feel so uncommon?

At the same time, I have to acknowledge that the corpus really is just a sampling (albeit a very BIG sampling) of American English usage. For example, I was talking to my brother about our Thanksgiving plans, and he was thinking of sharing a ride with my sisters:

"When are they leaving?"

"They said 4:30."

"Oh. I'll have already been working two hours by then." (i.e. he starts work at 2:30)

"Oh shoot. Well maybe we can work something else out."

My brother is not an English major, yet what he is saying is very linguistically complex, and there was nothing strange or unusual about the context. However, when I searched the corpus for this construction, no results came back. In other words, the corpus may not catch constructions that are still used in everyday situations. I remember talking to my old professor about grammar forms that were not easily classified. He said there are some grammatical theories that contend there are thousands of clause types (a fact which is "terrifying" for students, as he put it), and some of these myriad constructions are restricted to extremely specific contexts (considering the conversation I had with my brother--when else would you use the future present perfect continuous?).

I always feel like this is a cop out answer, but in addition to focused study, I really think it's important to read a lot AND talk to a lot of people AND watch a lot of movies/television AND listen to the radio in the second language on a daily basis, and hopefully, as a result, these things will come in through osmosis.

At least that's the hope.

-Bill

I was reading a fellow ELT blogger's thought-provoking entry about assessment that got me thinking about the confines of curricula but also about how I have not seen other somewhat obvious ways the curriculum objectives can be met. It's easy to get a big head because we have degrees and certificates and good English. If students bristle at an assignment or don't like some activities in the class, I've found myself adopting an attitude of "well, I'm the expert. You might want to cram for the IELTS/TOEFL/MELAB/[insert language proficiency test here], but that won't help you in the long run." But sometimes it's good to listen to students and that yields a lot of fruit. One time my students were all slacking on an essay I was having them write, and it was a day for the rough draft and half of them had essays, and the other half didn't, and the rough drafts that were brought to class were not very good. I just asked them point blank: "Okay guys, this is terrible. What's the deal? Why aren't you getting this done?"

They said they were all so busy writing Statements of Purpose/Letters of Intent for graduate schools they were applying to and that they were spending all night filling out applications and writing letters.

Normally, I deploy a tried-and-true lecture/guilt trip to my students about how I did graduate coursework while I was teaching while my wife had just given birth to a baby while I was totally burned out and exhausted while I had to study for a teacher certification test to get my ESL endorsement AND while I was applying for jobs worrying if I would be able to feed my family! "We all have responsibilities outside of this class" and blah blah blah.

But I took a different route and got off my high-horse and said, "Well, a letter of intent is no different than a persuasive essay--probably one of the more high stakes persuasive essays you'll ever have to write! Forget about this other essay. We're writing statements of purpose!"

"Really?"

"Yes."

"What do we do?"

"Print off your statements of purpose and bring them to class tomorrow. We're going to read them and make them better."

I left class that day feeling a little uneasy. What if I've just called their bluff and then they don't do this assignment either? Should I plan a backup lesson? But somehow, something felt right, almost like Harry drinking that vial of Felix Felicis. The next day, every student brought in an essay! I went from a mediocre 50% to a 100% completion rate for the assignment. Students were engaged and asking questions and eager to share and get feedback. No one was off-task or checking their phones. I was really pleased with myself for being so clever but then I stopped and thought about it, and really, I was just listening to the students and giving them what they wanted. They had to learn about persuasion, and they did--they just weren't writing about gun control, or school uniforms, or the death penalty.

Have you ever stopped to listen to your students and come up with a win-win situation in the end? Leave a comment and tell me about it!

-Bill