Cheating in the Foreign-Language Classroom: Nein, ¡No!, Non, Nie, Ne, Voch, Lay, Mhai, Nej, Nyet.

Chances are, if you are in college, you are taking at least one (preferably two!) years of a foreign language. This "requirement" (I prefer to think of it as a "privilege long-overdue, considering everyone in every other developed nation speaks at least two languages," but hey, semantics) can be a source of stress to many students, who either had bad experiences with a Peggy Hill type in middle/high school*, or who simply continue to believe that "everyone speaks English anyway."

*Many middle and high-school foreign-language teachers are among the most gifted I have ever known, but I do understand that sometimes there are some duds.

If you're in the first camp, well, I feel for you, and I hope you'll give your college instructor the benefit of the doubt. Here's why:

• If you go to a big state university, your instructor is a fresh-faced grad student much like me circa 2006--and don't despair about this fact. Their newness means they seriously care a lot, and that they are (usually) on top of the latest methods of SLA (that's jargon for Second Language Acquisition, something we study in very serious graduate seminars!). In other words, your graduate instructor is going to be seriously, awesomely invested in your class, and you should be happy you don't have some 90-year-old Russian lady who just does Russian grammar all day (especially in a Spanish class, har har). 
• If you go to a small liberal-arts college, your beginning-to-intermediate language teacher will be a regular-old prof--and this individual will be experienced, as well as delighted to be teaching first- or second-year classes, because (another dirty professor secret) they are really. Easy. To prepare. Especially if you have taught them before. 

So, be happy in the knowledge that college is different, and give your foreign language class a chance.

If you're in the second camp, well, replace "English" with "Mandarin" and maybe you're right. This is a blab for another time, but: really? We live in a global world! Do you know how good it looks on your resume to be "fluent" in another language? Employers love this: they see "fluent French/Spanish/Hindi/Farsi/Russian" and they think, "This individual is disciplined enough to gain fluency in another language--s/he can certainly handle the demands of this job!" 

So, adjust your attitude, Mein Herr/Meine Dame, Sr/Sra, Madame/Monsieur, etc.

However. Even the best attitude won't get rid of the stress associated with foreign-language learning. Some people have a natural gift for languages--but for everyone else, it takes a lot of hard work. 

And that's where we generally reach an impasse (that's French for "sh*t students and profs disagree on"). We want you to work hard and get better at your language; you want to not work hard and it's scheiß egal to you whether or not you get better.

So here's the secret I'd like to share today: It's actually less work to work "hard" (or hard-ish) and get better (at which point you don't have to work as hard!) than it is to cheat--especially if you get caught.

And here's the second secret: a first- or second-year foreign language student who cheats is remarkably easy to catch. So easy it boggles my mind that anyone gets away with it.

Here's how we do it. Would you like to read the first sentence of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, one of the most famous opening lines of all literature ever? Well, here it is, translated into English from the original German courtesy of an online translator:

When Gregor Samsa of one morning from uneasy dreams awoke, he was transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

"But wait," you might be thinking. "I thought Kafka was supposed to be a good writer. That sucks!" You're right--it does suck. And that's why professional human people with advanced degrees in translation translate things, and not robots. A full Babelfish- or Google-translated edition of The Metamorphosis might be really cheap to produce, but it will be gibberish. 

As a native speaker of English, you can immediately recognize the robot-translated Kafka sentence as gobbeldygook. As a native or near-native speaker of the language you're learning, your instructor will similarly recognize everything you turn in from an online translator as gibberish--and not the gibberish a regular beginner will produce, special robot-gibberish that makes mistakes only a robot would make.

Here's another issue: the straight-up cut-and paste. This is also remarkably easy to catch. Here's how. 


Here's the English version of the kind of stuff that (unfortunately) shows up in my classroom all the time:

The Otto von Bismarck was an very good ruler. As the leader of what historians call "revolutionary conservatism." Bismarck became a hero to German nationalists; they built hundreds of monuments glorifying the symbol of powerful personal leadership. Historians praised him as a statesman of moderation and balance who was primarily responsible for the unification of the German states into a nation-state.* Bismarck was great and I would like to known him in my day today.

Notice how the first and last sentence are both short, simple and contain several small grammatical errors just like someone first learning English might make? And the middle part (which as the asterisk notes, was cut-and-pasted verbatim from Wikipedia) sounds fancypants and is full of expert jargon that only an experienced historian would know? Notice how painfully, painfully obvious that is? 

So, in order to "successfully" employ the aforementioned cheating methods (i.e. not get caught), you would have to go through each word and either make it "not as good" (in the case of the cut/paste job), or "look like a human wrote it and then make it not as good" (in the case of the online translator). This, in the end, will work against your original goal (not to work harder) in two ways:

1. It will actually take you longer to locate material to cheat with and then alter it than it would to just write the whole damn thing from scratch--which, being a first- or second-year level assignment, is rarely, if ever, going to be more than 250-500 words long (that's two pages, you lazypants).
2. You will not get any better, so things like this will continue to be "too hard" and the cycle will just repeat itself (plus you will probably fail your finals because you didn't learn anything).

Here's another dirty professor secret: the purpose of writing assignments in the foreign-language classroom is precisely for you to turn in a poorly-written assignment full of mistakes so that we can help you correct them--and that is how you learn to write in a foreign language. So, in a way, the worse your draft is, the better, because a) we know you actually did it yourself, and b) we can work with you so that writing in the target language will actually become easy for you.

So here, at long last, is a five-step list for how you SHOULD write a writing assignment:

1. If it's a project that requires research, do said research in whatever language you want and then simplify the facts about that research until you can think them out in your target language. Then, take a short list of notes wherein you write these facts down in the target language.
2. With these facts in hand (or with only your big smart mind if it's not a research project), think in your target language in your head. DO NOT THINK IN ENGLISH/your native language. No matter how rudimentary it is, get a target-language inner monologue going.
3. Write that inner monologue down. DO NOT worry about making mistakes. Just write.
4. If you come upon a concept you simply cannot express in your target language, FIRST try to "explain around it" the best you can using words you know. 
1. Funny example: once, when I was learning Czech, I was asked to describe a cartoon wherein a hedgehog named Krtek tried to climb up a ladder. I did not know how to say "try," "climb" or "ladder," so instead what I said was, "At first Krtek tries to go up high alone." My teacher was de-lighted. The woman next to me just said, in English: "How do you say 'tries to go up a ladder?'" That was totally useless, because you do not learn a foreign language by translating your English verbatim. That produces results you can only use once, whereas using vocabulary you know in different ways and slowly building new vocab actually helps you. Which brings me, finally, to this:
5. For a word you absolutely, positively need, look it up in a dictionary with the understanding that with your limited knowledge of the language, the version of the word you choose may be a synonym that doesn't fit (see the above post, re: MS Word Thesaurus). 
1. Another one: A student once wrote in a German essay the equivalent of, "I saw my boyfriend and I kissed his visage." The word the student used for "face," Angesicht, is the antiquated, highfalutin one, as opposed to Gesicht, the regular one. It was noticeably off, but it was a teaching moment rather than a "haul you in to the Dishonesty Dean" one.

Now you're done! If it's a first draft of many (which, in a beginning class, it should be), just turn it in. Yay. If it's for a more advanced class, MAYBE look through it once to catch some of the more obvious errors, but don't stress it too much. 

All right, that's my spiel for the foreign-language students out there! Huzzah! Now get to work.