Lesson Download: November 11 - Remembrance/Veterans/Armistice Day [RE-POST]

The day is almost upon us and regardless of what you call November the 11th or how you commemorate it, it is an important day of reflection. In the adult ESL classroom, the subject of war can often be considered taboo, as our students have come from such diverse backgrounds. Some of our students have done obligatory military service in Korea, Brazil, Mexico, or elsewhere. Some of our students have been victims of war and endured horrors we can only imagine and that have scarred them and their families forever. Some of our students still bear the pain and, somewhere deep, the grudges of their parents or grandparents who fought in the World Wars. Some students may be reluctant to engage with peers who hail from countries that were once (or may still be) considered bitter enemies of their own country. It is a complicated topic, fraught with landmines of fear, pain, and distrust. Every once in awhile, though, it's important to open the door to discussion, to conflict, to the taboo, if only to take a look and see if we're ready to go there. To grow a little. To understand ourselves and each other a little better. Peace is up to us.

With that, I leave a lesson on November 11, Canadian-style. It's meant to open up discussion and give us all food for thought. I didn't include discussion questions for the song and cloze because I thought it might be nice just to let the students do a private journal reflection after the song. You might get the students to create their own doves at tagxedo.com. Enjoy the lesson - copy it, share it and let me know how it went and what reflections emerged!

If you are curious about the poppy (pic above) and Canadian customs around the poppy, here's my blogpost: "What to Wear - The Poppy (Red is the New Black)"

Improve Your Global Business English

The Fabulous Functionall Resource Review #3

One of the goals of this blog is to help you sort through the overwhelming number of language resources available to choose the materials that are right for your language learning or teaching journey. Not only is there a plethora of resources, they don't come cheap. Let this old hat do the research and save you time and money. Lord knows, we teachers need more of both! - Fiona 

for more information about my reviewing approach click here

   About 15 years ago, at one of my first teaching jobs, I was given the assignment of teaching a Brazilian businessman "Business English". I'm not sure why I was asked or what his ultimate impressions were but let's just say it was a learning experience all around. I had no business background. I was a geeky linguistics graduate. The small school where I was teaching had few "Business English" resources, all of which were outdated or extremely basic or both. At that time, there was also very little available online. My student and I cobbled our lessons together, based on his particular needs and what was essentially my ability to fake it. 

Fast forward to Improve Your Global Business English - this resource would have saved my skin 15 years ago. 

Book for Review: 

Improve Your 
Global Business English

Authors: 

Fiona Talbot 
& 
Sudakshina Bhattacharjee

In Depth Resource Review:

Author Fiona Talbot has referred to Improve Your Global Business English as an "office guide" used for "self-development". This is a good description. It is certainly well-suited to independent study and reference but this doesn't exclude it from being a great classroom resource as well. It is smart, thoughtful, practical and relevant. My four favourite things!

¨

The Introduction does a nice job of explaining a) who the book is for b) how to use it and c) the book's terminology and spelling (Mid-Atlantic!) philosophy. It also makes it obvious that only advanced English language learners or native speakers will be able to negotiate the book's meaning and fully engage with its content. 

           ¨

The book addresses important themes including:

• defining global business English within your organization
• understanding cultures, subcultures and approaches to businesses and workplaces
• the changing face of writing in the digital age
• common challenges in business English
• using email efficiently
• writing for impact
• writing agendas, notes, and minutes of meetings
• how to write for Twitter
• offering or requesting support
• using the right words to motivate

           ¨

If some of this doesn't sound like a language learning resource, you're right. It is as much a business resource for native speakers as it is a language guide for business English learners and it strikes a nice balance between the two. I think this is what makes Improve Your Global Business English so relevant and useful. It doesn't look at language in a vacuum but in the context of its purpose. 

           ¨

And rest assured, the content is well-supported with activities and review exercises that would be very adaptable to an ESL/EFL environment:

           ¨
Of course, no resource is perfect - there is a great deal of content crammed into what could have been spread over two or three volumes (which I guess also means you get your money's worth!). I sometimes found the organization odd and confusing (for example, "The purpose of this book" passage really belongs in the introduction, not in Chapter One). 

You know how I love my visual cues and I'm always all about less talk, more action, so I do feel Improve Your Global Business English is text-heavy and that may intimidate some learners and educators. I'd like to see more "check-ins", exercises, images, perhaps even some field activities (a.k.a. 'homework') for self-assessment and practice. 
          ¨

Despite these weaknesses, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend  Improve Your Global Business English to any Business English educator or learner as there is much here to draw upon and expand upon - it's a reference and guide that will be dog-eared in no time! 

Pronunciation and prejudice

The class was dynamic: the students young, engaged, goofy, courageous. They were Chinese high school students with excellent vocabularies and confidence to spare. I took to them instantly. Perhaps it was mutual.

I gave them fun tasks and then some challenging projects and they surpassed my expectations every time. But. 

The students often complained that nobody in the shops or restaurants, on the streets, or on campus understood them and their often simple requests. You see, outside of the classroom and beyond my protective #ELT net, my students' English accomplishments fell on deaf ears. Or, to re-phrase, their words fell on ears unaccustomed to their accents and, seemingly, reluctant to stretch a lobe familiar boundaries. For the untrained and impatient listener, these students were very difficult to understand. On the surface, it might even seem and feel like prejudice, much like when my mother-in-law pretends not to understand someone helping her out from a call centre halfway around the world. 

But let's face it. Pronunciation prejudice goes both ways and might be summed up thus:

1) Native listeners and speakers who can't be bothered to negotiate misplaced stress, an off-vowel, or a fumbled consonant cluster

and

2) English language learners who may have mastered the syntax, vocabulary, grammar, and meaning of an utterance but don't take honing their pronunciation seriously

Of course, when discussing "intelligibility", it is more complicated than that and ongoing research has resulted in a multitude of explanations, none of them mutually exclusive. 

I remember in my early teaching days, repeating to my students a theory I half-remembered from a lecture that suggested "stress misplacement" was the most significant cause of misunderstanding, or lack of intelligibility, between speaker and listener.  I hadn't ever bothered to source my assertions but I certainly had vats of empirical evidence in my own classroom and in my own life. However casually I tossed this theory out to my students, it seemed to make them seriously consider and invest in the pronunciation component of their language learning. Thanks to Dr. Google McLinguist, I have no trouble these days finding support for my then-flimsy pedagogy.

An example:

"some accounts of speech processing raise the possibility that the stressed syllable of a word provides the listener with a code that links directly to the representation of the word in the mind"

and in this paper's conclusions: 

"the consequences of misinterpreting even a small

number of content words can be extremely damaging to global understanding"

full paper here

In other words, what I had been saying to my students all along: "They don't understand you, despite your good grammar and natural vocabulary, because it's not how they expect to hear you say it".  The listener is already programmed. ESL teachers, on the other hand, have a certain listening flexibility after years of negotiating intelligibility and meaning with non-native speakers of various backgrounds.

I am obviously far from an expert in this field but the crux of it is this: we can't train all the listeners.  All the perfect grammar and stellar vocabulary in the world may just fall on deaf ears if we don't include or even emphasize pronunciation teaching and practice. With globalization, pronunciation teaching has become a bit of minefield of accents, dialects, and political correctness. Educators wonder what to teach and what to correct or accept. As with any other aspect of language learning, it is a delicate balance and an environment in which ultimately, the educator can only share his or her own experience and knowledge.

In the end, we want our students to be confident, to be successful, and to be heard. After all their hard work, that's the least we can give them. 

p.s. speaking of experts, the talented and brilliant Dr. Bill Acton of Trinity Western University has created an intuitive, effective haptic pronunciation program called, yup, "Acton Haptic". If you're like me and so-so at pronunciation teaching and not sure where to start, this all-inclusive video-based program does it all. Press play and you and your students learn together. Test run Acton Haptic here and read about Dr. Acton's research here.

All about my friends

So it's that day again. It's the Anti-White Day. Or the who-the-heck-is-Sadie-Hawkins Day. It's HEART day or pink-&-red-shirt day. It's I-wish-he-would-call-me-day or let's-go-have-fun-regardless day. Ok, it's also the day my husband proposed to me on an impromptu night away, rustling through his bag for a hidden ruby & diamond ring before asking me to never leave his side.  He confessed later: "I didn't want it to be on such a predictable day but it just seemed right". There was nothing predictable about his proposal and there hasn't been much predictable since.

Whatever love is in your life this St. Valentine's Day, 2013, there is always the love of our friends, be they our BFFs or partners-in-life. Or if we're lucky, both. Here's a Valentine lesson discussing and celebrating the many types of friendship. All from my words for women & girls, Serious Girl Talk Series. I know, totally awesome. You're welcome. Oh wait, and I stuck some of it on Pinterest too. Don't say I don't love you.

For ESL, intermediate +, reading, writing, grammar, speaking, pronunciation. Great quotations & stimulating discussion. My Valentine to you - hard-working teachers & learners.
 
And here's the issuu version for you ipadders:

An Insue by any other name

An ESL student phenomenon that has never ceased to surprise, dismay, and sometimes amuse me over the years is the student acquisition of the "English Name". 

It probably has its roots in the early communicative and the "when-you-walk-through-this-door-your-every-thought-breath-utterance-will-be-English" approaches, 

but sometimes it smacks of colonialism or something Saidian & "other"-associated. Whatever its beginnings, on some level, for better or for worse, it irks me. 

My class roster is a naturally changeable beast, typically from semester to semester and program to program, but also with the ebb and flow of immigration waves. When I first starting teaching more than 15 years ago, 90% of my adult ESL students were Japanese; now, in my western Canadian classroom, Saudi and Chinese students battle for top billing. I am, of course, thrilled to engage with any culture or language group. However, perhaps not every language group would say the same for me. 

Full disclosure: I S-U-C-K at pronouncing some of my students' names. My Chinese pronunciation in particular is shockingly mutilative. (hundreds of my former students are furiously nodding their heads up and down right now)

In the early days, I never questioned the Kings, Dragons, Roses, Jets, Felicias, Chastitys, Moons, or Suns but over the last few years I've made a point of trying to get to the origins of "the English name". Sometimes I'm told that their English teacher back home "assigned" it, or that it sounds like their 'real' name, or that it's their Christian name, 

(totally get it, Sister Rosa; one half of my Korean nun-pair one fabulous year. p.s. was sweating that dating & marriage unit until you told me you'd tried marijuana.)

or that they just wanted to switch it up in a new country. Sometimes it's obvious why when they cringe as I audibly butcher their names during the first roll call. 

But let me say this: your 'real' name is YOU! I want to know that you and what that name means in your language and what it meant to your parents and what you like or don't like about it. I want you to teach me and your classmates how to say it properly. 

I hate when a classmate of yours quietly asks me your name 8 weeks into the semester when I'm partnering you together for an activity. 

I want to hear your name in our classroom because I believe it makes you heard and seen in this new place and this new language in which you have so bravely chosen to learn, love, and succeed. 

So, my fellow educators and learners, let's make sure we build our classroom community from the ground up, starting with learning each other's names inside and out. Name collages? Name games? Red rover, red rover, I call Zhi Qiang over? Love to hear what you do to celebrate names in the classroom.

This is dedicated to Insue and to Jesse (which sounds nothing like Dae Kyeong, does it?)

Good name-changing advice from 'Philip "do-not-be-creative" Guo': How to choose an English name

Aw, hell, pick a random name with BarryfunEnglish: English Name Maker

Or ask yourself those deep name-changing questions @ English Gateway: What's In A Name?

Lesson Download: "Canadian Languages"

Although I'm still crying from laughter, thanks to @SSavides' tweeting of "Learn English with Ricky Gervais", here's a new, fabulous project-based, blended-learning lesson on "Canadian Languages" that helps explore the Canadian census findings on our official languages and the growth of the allophone! Sounds complicated but it's great fun, I promise. Free for you to use and share, courtesy of yours truly and Camosun International.

Pin to Learn - Learn to Pin

It's true. I joined Pinterest about a month ago. I don't know why exactly. I don't bake and, while I like traveling and shopping, I don't seem to actually get to do either very often. But something about Pinterest seems like a natural fit for education and educational materials and well, I do both of those quite often. I have my "pin it" on my toolbar and am tickled when a cool infographic or resource crosses my web-path and *poof*, I can pin it to my board! Unfortunately, I've discovered my flash-based website coughs up not a single pin and yup, you guessed it, neither does my box.com-embedded lesson download on blogger. So, without further ado, I have converted my latest lesson to jpg, just so I can pin it for your viewing pleasure.  Oh, and you probably guessed this as well: It's a Pinterest project-based lesson. Happy pinning!

p.s. You are more than welcome to print and use but if you want the original copy, just email me and ask nicely! Oh, and of course, check my pinning-progress out on Pinterest. And...I love comments, so please do.

Lesson Download: "First Nations on Vancouver Island"

Enjoy & share this new lesson! Created for Camosun College International by yours truly. INTERMEDIATE + LEVEL.  Love your feedback too!

Your going to be mad, but Team Grammar may have lost this one

When it first started, we linguists and teachers were pretty smug. It's just the teenagers, we may have snickered. And then, those lazy texters. And then perhaps we started to sweat a little and tug at our collars because suddenly it was on Facebook, Twitter, our students' essays, and egads, even work emails. From colleagues!


Yes, we too made the occasional error. Worse: sometimes we didn't catch it in time before it was *poofed* out into cyberspace. But the very, VERY worst of all?


Nobody noticed. 


I do not admit defeat easily, but the ubiquitous use of the possessive adjective "your" when and where "you are" or its contraction "you're" is required is as common as, well, the use of the word "ubiquitous".  At what point, my prescriptivist friends, do we wave the white flag and stop snickering? Doesn't usage trump all? The people have chosen. After all, it's only a teeny 'be' verb we've disappeared. We disappear it in newspaper headlines all the time. 


Of course, it's not just a tiny 'be' verb left behind, but entire grammatical constructs abandoned hastily on the side of the road. That 'be' verb is part and parcel of its continuous or passive form, or (excuse me while I dry my eyes) of its participle partner.  How lonely those other halves must be, with their -ing's and -ed's hanging out there for the world to see.


I envision children in 2025 asking their teachers (um, I mean devices) why we write They are walking down the street and She is walking down the street but Your walking down the street. I envision myself waiting for the second part of a text after I receive: your awesome. Oh, wait. I already do that.  


I suspect it will become just another weird English anomaly that we geeky teachers get to explain to new language learners as they struggle with grammar and context. One day, though, we'll forget how it all started and have to refer to our OED app, which might read something like this: 


Your (yor, yər) n. + v.  Contraction of "you" and "are"  
[Forms: You're Obs. rare 2009 Fiona's phone. "You're such a good friend"]

Email & laser tag: edtech baby steps to team-building

When Jax* told me her students didn't have her email address, I think my mouth dropped open a little. I might have spluttered something about maintaining boundaries and then went back to my marking. In the back of my mind, though, I was musing about dinosaurs and rotary phones.

Jax is an engaged, smart, witty, and hard working teacher. She's well-read, well-travelled, well-spoken and totally dedicated to her students. So why isn't she in email contact with them?

I have to confess I only started communicating with my students electronically about 2 and half years ago but I could never go back to the way it was before. For one, my students find it helpful - they can ask a quick question, send in their homework, or share something personal that they might not be able to say in class. For another, I find it helpful - it helps me stay organized, is easier for marking written assignments, and most of all, helps me get and keep my finger on the pulse of my class.

In an adult multicultural ESL classroom, one of the most difficult challenges is team-building, getting the students to work together in a way that benefits them all. By starting a term off with a collective, connective email, you set the stage for communication and collaboration. Mid-term? Laser tag. Trust me. You'll never use a rotary phone again.

No excuses - debunking email/DM myths:

I'm worried about protecting my privacy and my students' privacy!
There are many platforms and programs that conceal email addresses and other sensitive information.   You never have to use your personal email and your students sure won't use theirs.

It's not very professional to send emails to my students.
Almost every single communication is now acceptable via email. If you conduct yourself in writing as you would in the classroom, then it's up to you how professional you are.

It's so time-consuming. 
Limit the tasks and correspondence to what you can handle. Alert: students have lives too and don't spend every waking moment wanting to email or DM their teacher.

If email is your edtech-baby step, then it's time to take it.


*might be her real name, might not

'Tis the season to be jolly - jajajajaja jajajaja (or "the laugh seen around the world")

A chicken sounds like what??!! I was trying furiously not to laugh as my students starting making all manners of sounds. Who knew Japanese cows sounded like that? Or Chinese chickens. It was one of those odd but happy accidents in the ESL classroom when I discovered yet another thing I didn't know: different languages have different sounds for their animal uttterances. That day, the multicultural mix of my Canadian ESL classroom created a cacophony of the strangest noises ever heard by English or otherwise ears. It was hysterical.

A similar dawning of new knowledge has been slowly stretching over me as I embrace digital communication with my students. I teach adults and therefore don't struggle with some of the privacy fears and issues my colleagues have with communicating with their students via Facebook, email, or text. I share messages, updates, announcements, encouragement etc...with my students using whatever method of communication they feel most comfortable using and with which they are most engaged. It's fantastic. It was on Facebook that I first started to notice:

kkkkkkkkkkkkkkk


and


jajajajajaja


and the mysterious

^^

or even

~~~


Huh?

Ok, I'm not so slow that I didn't figure it out. My students are laughing! In text! In different letters or characters than in English! And not the dreaded and dreadful  lol fake-laugh! Also funny: I make kkkkkkkkk and jajajajaja sounds in my own head as I laugh along with them.

Of course, there's cool linguistic stuff here too: Spanish speakers and their "ja ja", Greek speakers and "xa xa" - small clues into the sounds of their languages (and sometimes how those sounds affect their English pronunciation!) - and the Japanese "~~~"  or Korean "^^" - western keyboard equivalents for the Chinese character 笑  (laugh). Just can't explain that kkkkkk.

And so I will live to learn and laugh another day. Thank you, my friends.

p.s. Blessed with these real AND Facebook friends who responded quickly to my plea for more examples of international laughs in text:

Alice & Janine (Swiss) - hehe or hihi
Daniel (Spanish) - jaja
Luanna (Brazilian Portuguese)- kkkkkkk
Hiroko (Japanese) - ~~~ or ^^
Hani (Arabic) - kkkkkkk
Grace (Tagalog) - nyahaha or hehe or hihi
Louis (Korean) - ^^
Dino (Chinese) - ^^
Aoy (Thai) - 555
Christine & Terry (Greek) - xa xa
Santa (North Polian) - hohoho

Please add comments or any other laughter from around the world! Happy holidays.

Recalling Nunan: Action Research & A Grain of Salt

I have no doubt he had done this drill before - it was so well-executed. The purposeful transition from transcript-to audio-to video. He had us hooked. The resulting collective arrival at understanding a certainty for him - both an eye-opener and aha! for us. As they say, David Nunan had it going on.

In those early days of my teaching career, the idea that I would willingly analyze, evaluate, and (egads!) criticize my own teaching seemed foreign...and terrifying. I was just trying to find and keep a good teaching job and not screw up TOO much. What Nunan showed us in his seminar that day, that teachers are imperfect, that he was imperfect, and that it was worthwhile, even vital, to explore these imperfections was frankly, beyond me.

Fast-forward fifteen years or so and those early insecurities have long been quashed by the thousands of classes I have facilitated and the students I have taught . That's not to say I don't get the occasional butterfly or sinking feeling of  impending pedagogical disaster but, generally, I like to think I'm on pretty solid ground in my classrooms and with my students.

What happened a few weeks ago, while not shaking the ground exactly, was a gentle Nunan nudge, a reminder that what I may perceive as a well-run classroom stuffed with great learning and instruction, may indeed be a dud, or worse, a missile with no target - set to explode in the wrong place at some inopportune time.

I was subbing for a colleague, off for some long-put off and vital dental work. My colleague is a pistol and she knows her stuff but within minutes of starting the class I knew the students had turned on her. Throughout my lesson, there were furtive looks and an undercurrent of energy that smelled like excitement. Predator on prey. I can't explain why I knew this bloodlust wasn't about me. I can't explain why I wasn't surprised when I was pulled into the office later and told that there had been a mutiny after my lesson and that they were demanding my colleague's pretty head on a stick.

This all made me feel quite sick.

My years teaching ESL to adults have taught me many things, including: 1) ELT is a minefield like no other teaching field - with cultural, racial, individual, financial, and political overtones of every sort 2) ELT professionals are sometimes treated by students and administration alike as if they are dispensable, disposable (the "you speak English therefore you can teach it" mentality) 3) A successful classroom is sometimes not about skill and experience but a "good match" 4) Adult ESL students can be fickle.

Never in a million years would I imagine a mutiny in a college Physics class. Or a university German course. Why does criticism seem so much more accessible in ELT? Most of us in ELT embrace Nunan's action research philosophy with gusto. Perhaps too much gusto. Perhaps we haven't asserted ourselves and established our profession as a profession. How else can I explain a group of adult language learners demanding a different instructor for no other reason than they thought they were missing out on something?

I do know what happened that day and I don't need any formal action research to explore it - my personality and approach were better matches to the students' perceived needs. I was no "better" or "worse" a teacher than my colleague. They simply believed that my approach was better-suited to their needs. They believed. Is perception everything?

As I said to my colleague that week, while she kicked herself over and over, the one piece she could own, the single thing some action research might have revealed is:  why didn't the students talk to her about their concerns?

 My colleague is an exemplary teacher. What her students thought they had missed from their coursebook and lessons had been well-supplemented with more current, relevant, and interesting material. As students, they couldn't recognize that. And they shouldn't have. That's the teacher's job.

Nobody's perfect. Definitely not me. Not you. Not Nunan.

That said, we are educated, gifted, progressive, reflective, intuitive, experienced, creative, and skilled educators, facilitators, guides, and mentors. It's time to own what we know.

Cheating: not just for students!

A few weeks ago in the Canadian media, there was much ado about the so-called disproportionate number of international students in Canadian universities caught cheating and plagiarising. The headlines were typically sensational and smacking of the Us vs. Them isolationist rhetoric that is being spewed in certain quarters in the U.S. and Canada.

However uncomfortable I am with the rhetoric, as an ESL teacher, I cannot deny that some of my students and yes, some cultures (how can I say this delicately?) seem more accepting of the concept of cheating than I ever was when an undergraduate student. Below is a summary of a U.K. survey by the Higher Education Academy detailing various reasons for cheating and plagiarism. The summary and larger report are both interesting and unsurprising. I recommend anyone in ELT read the report, if only to reflect on the issue and perhaps develop your own, informed approach to managing cheaters.

As for me? Well, the article was well-timed. Turns out I have my very own cheater in my midst. Trouble is, it's not a student, but a colleague. Worse, the colleague is plagiarising ME! Worst, the colleague is also a friend. I know, I know, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...blah blah blah. It doesn't feel like flattery though, it feels like betrayal.

In our tech-age, so much is available at our fingertips and even I admit that many of the faceless contributions online seem almost anonymous. Note to World: they are not! Someone has worked hard and spent time to research, source, write, and contribute whatever bit of information it is that you are cutting and pasting in a millisecond. Credit him. Tweet her. Remember this old-fashioned word: CITE! Second note to World: it is a small world.

Now, in my case, it wasn't a simple act of plagiarism but complete and exact copies of sections of a copyrighted and isbn'd textbook I authored stuffed into the template of "new" curriculum designed for a local college. It was by pure chance that it came across my desk. A last-minute contract. Imagine my surprise.

Perhaps cheating and plagiarising is less cultural than individual. Perhaps we all are guilty of some measure of intellectual theft. Perhaps sometimes the dance at the photocopier in the morning is less than legit.

Perhaps students and teachers are not so far apart.

Oh, and, ok,um, I'm a little bit flattered. BUY THE AMAZING ESL BOOK THAT IS WORTH PLAGIARISING right HERE (it's actually legally reproducible too - just don't say you wrote it!)

Stuff to read and share on cheating and plagiarising (extremely well-cited of course!) - your students will thank you for sharing it with them:

from "Overcoming the cultural issues associated with plagiarism for International students"

Authors: Dr. Charles Juwah, Centre for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen; Dr David Lal, Dept. of Business and Management, Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen; Ahmed Beloucif, Dept. of Marketing, Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen

What cultural factors impact how students understand the concept of plagiarism?

Respect for authority	25.6 %
Language problem	20.9 %
Previous educational experience on referencing conventions	27.9 %
Cultural misconception (Plagiarism does not matter)	20.9 %
Individual values (Personality trait)	4.7 %

Why do students plagiarise?

Lack of awareness of referencing conventions	19.61 %
Cheating	17.65 %
Lack of awareness of plagiarism	15.69 %
Time	9.8 %
Lack of confidence/self-worth	7.84 %
Language problem	7.84 %
Laziness	7.84 %
Lack of subject knowledge	5.88 %
Carelessness: forgetting to reference	5.88 %
Pressure to write to academic standard	1.96 %

from the Globe and Mail: Why many international students get a failing grade in academic integrity