This is a tough issue with language learners, because they often use other writer's words as part of their language learning process. Before students can produce language, they can understand it. They can often point to the main idea in a piece of writing more easily than they can put it in their own words, so they steal the language directly, hoping to survive the assignment, which is often too hard and not developmentally appropriate.
I remember one 12th grade ELL student, Vinh, who plagiarized his research assignment. Almost the entire thing appeared to be his copy of a website. I confronted Vinh, asking him if he could define certain words in his essay. He could not. Since this was the fifth time Vinh had done this, I asked him to stay after school to rewrite that essay, thinking if I could see him write, i would know he was using his own words. After a lot of grumbling, he agreed to stay and he rewrote the essay, which I graded. Vinh had no idea what he had researched. His sentences were barely readable, and it was clear that he didn't know what he'd done. Even though I gave Vinh a second chance, I still gave him an F.
Was that the right thing to do?
I'm not sure. I know that the assignment I'd given was too hard for Vinh, but I also know that no other teacher had ever called him out for copying his assignments from websites. In fact, that strategy had gotten him successfully all the way to 12th grade. By letting him get away with it, nobody was teaching Vinh to write. I wish I had been able to do that for Vinh, but by the time he showed up in my class, it was already too late. Vinh did the same thing on the writing competency test. He failed the test, failed my class, and failed to graduate.
The question I'm left with: did I fail Vinh?
Posted by Meredith at July 15, 2002 02:00 PMYou say this was "the fifth time Vinh had done this" -- was that the fifth time on _your_ watch? Were you aware of it, or suspicious of it, prior to this incident?
If not, then "the system" failed Vinh, and as you say, by the time you got him, it was too late.
What happened to Vinh afterwards? Did he drop out, or try and make up the class later? Was anything done to communicate what you learned about him to his future teachers?
Posted by: russell on July 19, 2002 12:18 PM