I was recently presented with an almost flawless piece of writing from a students whose English level precluded her producing such an almost flawless piece of writing. Initially I thought, “oh no…we have to have *that* conversation”…
In her tutorial the student guilty confessed to using translation software. I told her I was surprised because google translate famously produces awful translations from Japanese to English. “ah” she said, “I didn’t use google”.
She directed me to a site called DeepL. I threw a bit of Japanese in from Wikipedia and this is what I got out.
Now this isn’t perfect but it’s pretty damn good. For good measure I threw it into google translate and got a pretty good rendering too.
I was quite surprised at how good the Google Translate version was. But I shouldn’t have been . Sure, it was an endless source of comedy in 2004 when it produced weird and wacky sentences, but that was 15 years ago and technology moves on (in 2004 no one thought computers would beat humans at Go any time soon, that happened in 2015. There is an excellent documentary about it online). Google translate switched to using “Neural Machine Translation” around 2017 and this has reportedly led to much better quality translations.
So, is there any point in banning students from using translation software to write their essays anymore, particularly in EAP contexts? We wouldn’t mind them using dictionaries to translate words, and rather than just banning them, perhaps we could focus on getting them to use this tool more effectively? It certainly beats receiving a paid for or plagiarised submission.
Let me know your thoughts.
So, is there any point in banning students from using translation software to write their essays anymore, particularly in EAP contexts?
ReplyDeleteThis is kind of the hot question right now, isn't it?
As I'm sure you know, Mike Groves and Klaus Mundt have written a lot about this over the last 7 years or so and more recently at my university (Portsmouth, UK) we've been discussing this at some length.(Grammerly, of course, is the other one worth mentioning in this context).
On the whole, I am positive about it and the feeling at our place is that we should learn about how best to teach students to use such tools more effectively.
I think a significant challenge will come about in relating the use of machine translation to some form of integrated skills assessment.
For instance, imagine an exam in which:
PART 1: LISTENING Students listen to a 1-hour live lecture on a theme and take notes. The lecture refers to a number of texts the students will encounter in Part 2: Reading (below), setting them in context, giving background to the issue and so on.
PART 2: READING Students are given two hours to read X number of selected texts on the same theme as the lecture in Part 1 and take notes on these. They are given full access to a translation tool while reading and any use of that tool is recorded (as part of the exam).
PART 3: WRITING After a break of an hour, students are then asked to write an essay in response to a question on the same theme as the reading and in which they are expected to draw on the reading texts from earlier in the day. Again, they are given access to a translation tool and again, any use of this is recorded.
PART 4: DISCUSSION After the writing part, say, the next day or so, the students are allowed to re-read their own essay (in English) and then invited into an English-only oral discussion in which they are quizzed about their ideas and what they have written.
Quite how this would be assessed (not to mention managed in terms of administration) is hard to say and also complicated by the fact that there is a kind of cummulative jeopardy (i.e. if they don't really understand the lecture, they may find the significance of the reading harder to follow which in turn will impact the writing and ultimately the discussion).
But anyway, if those issues could be worked and if the monitoring points for the use of translation are just that - i.e. used for monitoring, but not penalised in any way - then I think something along those lines could be a suitable EAP assessment type regardless of how translation tools are used.
Now that the use of machine translation tools is so common, not only in universities but also the workplace, it's vital that we teach students how to use the tools properly. This is clearly a role for the EAP teacher. We can show them, for example, how to recognise the typical weaknesses of machine translation software. (And yes, we need training for this.)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, if we want to know what our students are capable of without the crutch of technology, then ban the technology. This is tricky when it comes to assessing L2 writing skills, but not impossible. It's a matter of knowing what to focus on. It could mean dispensing with essays, and breaking down the skills into separate components. An atomistic (dare I say 'granular'?) approach, rather than a holistic one.
More fundamentally, the use of machine translation in higher education raises serious questions about authorship and academic integrity. When it comes to L2 writing skills, whose English are we assessing? Does "Write in your own words?" still have any meaning? This is not only a problem for EAP but academia in general, especially where machine translation is used to bamboozle plagiarism detection software. No easy answers here, but please prove me wrong!
If translation tools are getting better, isn't that all the more reason to ban them? I have no problem with students writing drafts in L1 in order to be able to develop more sophisticated ideas and to learn words and phrases they might not otherwise be exposed to in English. And in the old days, even if they used a translation tool they would need to do at least some work on their own editing, rephrasing, and so on. But if the translation tools are so good that students can just write in L1, translate, and hand it in, then surely we must ban them.
ReplyDeleteOr accept that we no longer need to teach writing in English for most students because the technology has replaced the need to know a language in order to write in it.