Aps and Composing

From the WPA list . . .

I met with the Korean student I wrote about last week, the one who used a translation app to write his essay in English comp. A lot of you talked about the issues—thank you!--and so I thought you might like to hear what I found out.

He has an I-Pod Touch and downloaded the app “Google Translation” for free. He chose Korean as his native language and English as the target language. He showed me how it works—easy. To test it, I asked him to say the Korean equivalent of the English sentence, “Many people believe the economy is recovering.” He tried the entire sentence (in Korean) but the app stopped once and “didn’t work” (I didn’t see how) a second time. He then broke the sentence into phrases and got for the first phrase “Most people in Korea believe that . . .” and then for the second phrase “believe the economic recovery will work to. . . .” The result would be “Most people in Korea believe the economic recovery will work to . . .” He understood he’d have to finish that sentence—and of course, he could have by speaking Korean into the phone. He told me that the translation was pretty close—of course, he translated my sentence into Korean in his head first, so
I don’t know what the input was originally (since I don’t speak Korean). He then did something a bit simpler and said into the phone what came out as “Students in South Korea must study hard.” So at this point, Google Translation can handle relatively short phrases and simple sentences input orally but not, apparently, complex sentences.

He said he used the app in writing the essay he turned in for class in this way. He input the Korean sentence, using the keyboard, into the app and when the English translation came up, he typed it into his laptop. (He thinks that he could probably have emailed himself the translation and cut and paste but he wasn’t sure.) I didn’t have the chance to check whether the app can translate a more complex sentence that is typed in rather than spoken—I’ll need to follow up but my sense is that it can.

I noted earlier that the essay he wrote seemed disjointed but when I look at it again, it seems more uneven than disjointed—there are perfectly good English sentences followed by one that is oddly phrased as in “this was informative enough about X so that I know much more about it.” But I note that even the “good” English sentences seem, now that I think of it, “disjointed.” That is, a native speaker of English likely would not string those sentences together, even though they make sense. They lack the “music” of a native speaker’s fluency. Still, they are very good sentences for an ELL student writer.

I'm going to be bringing this issue up at our department meeting this week; I'm wondering if a broader campus-wide discussion needs to take place. I can imagine a lot of faculty having trouble with this--though I think at this point I'd argue that what he's doing is acceptable: his ESL course grades and TOEFL test scores were good enough to get into the college and to pursue his goal of a bachelor's degree in business (I think). So long as he can demonstrate competence with the course goals, I don't see why he can't use the translation app for all those that aren't standards of English language fluency.

I'll be interested to hear your thoughts.
j

Jeffrey Klausman, DA, MFA
Whatcom Community College
Bellingham, Washington
jklausma@whatcom.ctc.edu
http://www.faculty.whatcom.ctc.edu/jklausma
"Some of the miners returned to settle in Whatcom, or to farm
on the sunny islands beyond it, for having seen a summer full
of the million-dollar, slow sunsets in which the region specialized,
men of a certain disposition tended to return and drop anchor."
Annie Dillard, The Living