A “Hands-On” Approach to Raise Awareness of Technologies: A Pilot Class and its Lessons

Abstract

Despite attempts to discourage the use of machine translation (MT), we have observed that students continue to rely on it. Are teachers powerless? We believe not! Consistent with a range of solutions proposed in previous publications, we hypothesized that a “hands-on” approach would be effective in helping students raise awareness of the benefits and limitations of machine translation. This approach strives to reframe machine translation from an object of interdiction to an object of critical reflection. Hence, we created, implemented, and evaluated a 50-minute online lesson during Fall 2020. Our aim was to guide students toward a critical awareness of various machine translation tools [Google Translate (GT), WordReference.com (WR), French dictionaries] by choosing carefully crafted machine translation examples and asking students to correct them in class (“post-editing”). We also tried to track any potential change in the students’ representations via a confidential pre-and a post-survey, and an audio-record of the interactions in class. One of our main results is that a majority of the students had already built complex representations and clever usages of machine translation before the class, much more than what we had expected. This allows us to reflect on what kind of impacts can or cannot be expected from such a class and to discuss the benefits and limits of such an approach to better integrate translation tools into second language teaching.