Copycats

I think I mentioned several posts ago that Thai culture has this thing about saving face. Basically, a student's peers will do all they can to save him or her from embarrassing situations, like not having the correct answer in class or not having their homework done. Which means that even though copying is against the rules--and even Thai teachers say the students shouldn't do it--it's a ubiquitous practice anyway.

I've tried a few times to find ways around the copycat syndrome. For example, one of the assignments I asked my second year students to do was to draw their family trees, label each person with a name, and write six sentences about the relationships within their family tree (John is Tom's father, Mary is Paul's wife, etc). I congratulated myself on the idea--not that it's a particularly original one, but it should have gotten the students applying the vocabulary to themselves, making it more significant and personal. I figured that even if their family was really small--if there was a student who was an only child, say--they could at least do reverse relationships, which means they should be able to come up with six sentences even if they have three people in their family. And given that, from what I've seen, Thais often live with extended families, I figured they should be able to find even more sentences. Some students followed the assignment beautifully, and I could tell they'd gone to great effort to draw each member of their families. They even used the more complicated vocabulary words, like uncle and niece and cousin. As for the rest of the students . . . I got identical family trees from perhaps half of the class, and all of them were identical to the sample family tree I'd drawn on the board during class when we were practicing the vocabulary. They had different names, but the same minimalistic number of brothers, sisters, and so on. On several students' papers, I found that the names on the family tree didn't match the names in the sentences--basically, they'd changed the names on the diagram, but forgot to change the names when they copied each other's sentences. Frustrating to grade? You bet! The sad thing? This happens (in varying degrees) in nearly all the class levels I teach, with all of the assignments I give.

Intellectually, I know this is a cultural thing. I know I'm not going to change this part of the students' culture, nor do I particularly want to--getting rid of the saving face thing would get rid of so many other beautiful aspects of Thai culture. But having students that limit themselves to copying each other's work and memorizing things means having students that are limiting their own abilities to learn a new language. Language is about creativity. You haven't mastered a word or concept in a new language until you've experimented with it and used it in a new way, a way that hasn't just been handed to you. So with the copycat challenge of teaching where I am, I start wondering how much I'm actually teaching my students, and whether they'll remember anything I've taught them--and be able to use it.