Why Students Use Translators in Spanish Class

Do they honestly believe we don’t know the difference? Do they think we can’t tell? The truth is that they are they’re probably just kind of doing and not really thinking about you at all. But they do have reasons:

Not enough time – at times we truly expect them to do too much too fast, either because it’s been so long since we were novices that we just plain guess wrong or because we got in a time crunch ourselves #ithappens And impossible though it may seem, they MAY have other perfectly valid priorities consuming their time that they would otherwise allot to language learning.

Insecurity – perhaps it’s something internal that makes every error the end of the world for them, or that we honestly have not given them enough input, or that the task we designed is not, in fact, simple enough for them to accomplish with the skills we have actually practiced more than once.

Procrastination – sometimes the time issue is their own doing. However, in researching my own procrastinatory habits, I have discovered that avoidance usually stems from some sort of anxiety (see: insecurity)

Lack of preparation– maybe they missed one of the only two in-person days in your hybrid class. Maybe they skipped the videos. Maybe we straight-up need to give them more chances to practice before they tackle that assignment.

So what do we do about it?

It all starts with a lot of honest introspection and then some clearly communicated expectations.

Honest reflection on expectations – We have to start here. If you have one kid using a translator, you may just need to talk with that kid about what is going on, why they’re feeling anxious or pressed for time or unprepared. And maybe there is something we can do for that child. But if we have several perpetrators? It’s time to look at exactly what they were looking up and figure out how to work that into instruction. And maybe also time to step back and start over with more scaffolds, like sentence starters or low-stakes practice together on whiteboards or Peardeck.

Clear boundaries – Sentence starters are a great place to start, reference to specific notes they should use. I have also started adding signs to all of my written and spoken assignments for the “remote learning” days, depending on what the assignment calls for, like this one:

The spreadsheet refers to the glossary I have them keep. Did you know that Google Translate will SAVE what you look up for you??

I have my students save some words at the beginning of the school year and then keep adding to the list. The catch is that Google makes a new Google Sheets spreadsheet every time you want to save them, so mostly kids are just typing what they look up into the same one these days, but they have a repository that also carries with it the context of why they looked up the words before. I think it will take a whole other blog post to break down all of the glossary machinations, though, so stay tuned for that. Multiple drafts

Multiple opportunities – Now I don’t mean let them redo the same thing until they have honed their translatoring skills perfectly. What I’m talking about is different applications, different incarnations of a task. For example, if they are talking about what they do in their free time, they might go through all of these tasks:

• Copied notes
• “Levántate si” responses
• Practice sentences
• (socially distanced)Partnered Q&A practice
• Discussion board post + response
• Flipgrid post + response
• Google Slides presentation
• Adobe Spark video

(PS these are almost the exact steps we did for the first small group presentations this year. )

So not only do we head off the translator by A) having a resource they can look at instead that will both support their learning AND not get them in trouble and B) practicing so many times that it really is easier to just use what you know! It has the added benefit of assuring them that you really do want whatever they can offer at their level and also gives you a chance to redirect and point out specific parts you want them to rephrase and how.

Now, do I still have one or two students who insist on using translators? Yes. So it is going to take a little extra time to build trust and confidence with those kiddos. But have most of them settled into applying language we use in class? Definitely. And those who really just need to branch out and say something VERY specific (I got “cuando envejezca” this week), they have that security blanket until they get more confident too.