In comp tale 51, Maria Knudtson has a student misspell "neurotic" as "necrotic," due to the fact that spell checker didn't catch the mistake. My mentor often tells students that Microsoft Word's spell checker is terrible and that they shouldn't rely on it so heavily. As Knudtson says, my mentor also says, to check their work--even after using spell check. I once had this issue when trying to write "conscious," I wrote "conscience." While it's easy to get these words confused--phonetically and definition-wise--I relied on spell checker to catch this error for me. And lo and behold, I was wrong.
I think technology gives students--well, everyone--this false sense of security. Thinking it will catch mistakes and tell you when a word or grammar is wrong is something you learn of years of using Word's spell checker as a crutch. While its rate of success is higher than its failure, it's extremely important to use, as Knudtson states, "their own knowledge of words... and they must proofread after they spell check" (65).
So how can we convince students that spell checker isn't all that it's cracked up to be? I, for one, think--beyond blatantly stating it--telling stories, such as my little slip up, has more of an impact. Not only that, but telling the students that grammar and spelling mistakes can affect their grade is always an important note.
I've come across this a lot with students. Revision and proofreading, to them, are just silly, time wasting activities that English teachers have invented. An exercise that I've done before is to give my class two paragraphs that are identical, except for one word (like neurotic and necrotic). Then I ask them to summarize the two paragraphs. If they don't see a difference or know what one of the words mean then I pull up the definitions. Usually the paragraphs are funny and the word change makes the stories totally different. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.
ReplyDeleteYou can add conscientious to your two commonly confused/misspelled words. I hate those three, especially when I'm taking notes. I digress. Anyway, I agree that sharing examples is a way to deal with the issue of technology based goofs. One mistake I see with technology is the misuse of a thesaurus. Just because a word was listed as similar in the thesaurus does not a good swap make.
ReplyDeleteI always feel bad for students who rely on that little green squiggly line—because more often than not, it's just plain WRONG, or its suggestions ("passive voice—consider revising") are vague enough to make the student more confused. I always remind people, "grammar check can't read!" to drive the point home that a program relying on formulas can never be as good as an actual human being. I like your thought about telling stories about these issues to also make it clear to students that relying on spell & grammar check isn't as helpful as they think.
ReplyDeleteI think encouraging students to read aloud goes a long way. Spell check works, but you actually have to have a misspelled word for it work. It's not going to catch that you meant "neurotic" instead of "necrotic."
ReplyDeleteThe worst "sense of security" students fall into is the grammar checker. It's absolutely terrible. In my short time in the writing center, I've had many clients come in completely confused because Word is telling them that their sentence grammatically incorrect, but when we go over it, it's totally fine. That thing is completely useless. I say we write Microsoft angry letters and make them turn grammar check off by default!
First of all, love the profile pic. haha
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I agree with Jesse that reading aloud can go a long way, yet it is something I hadn't really thought about doing in class until this year. I don't have any harsh feelings toward spellcheck. It does what it claims it will do, but that means it won't necessarily find "misused words." Just this week in a tutorial with an international student, we discovered spellcheck had, in fact, changed all of her "froms" to "forms." I showed her how to do a 'find' on her document to fix all the ones we found and see if we missed any.
Sharing those stories is a good strategy, as well as going over the most commonly messed up ones. At the end of the day, it is up to the student to want to put in the effort and revise.
And by the way, why is Google finding fault with all the contractions?
ReplyDeleteI actually recently encountered this problem with a student in the Writing Center. The student was talking about bullying, but she consistently spelled it "bulling"; her professor circled the instances over and over and wrote "Don't rely on Spellcheck!" in big letters. I agree with you that the over-reliance on technology is a problem, and I like that your mentor tells students not to rely on Spellcheck. However, I think that this needs to become the norm for all educators, not just a blessed minority.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this leads me to a hypothesis--is the apparent lack of student attention to grammar that seems to be plaguing our academic world a product of an over-reliance on Spellcheck? Once we realized Spellcheck can ostensibly fix grammatical errors, suddenly grammar became less of a concern to students. Then again, this is probably an oversimplification of a much wider issue.