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[TawtViet]

I am working as an ALT in a couple of Japanese JHS. I enjoy the kids for the most part but their lack of brain use sometimes drives me up a wall!
Here's an example (among countless ones): I created an end-of-school-year review question activity for speaking purposes. I handed students a list of printed questions I had created, similar to ones in their text books. I included page numbers from of their textbooks for each question in order to assist them. One question I asked involved directions to the well-known, very close, and easy-to-get-to local post office. Most students proceeded to read the directions out off the textbook! The dialogue in the unit on directions included the words "...turn right at the second traffic signal." There is no traffic signal on the way to the post office so very near the school!
Why are they so dumb? Are Thai young people even a little sharper? I am quite interested in getting out of Japan. I need some students who are willing to play with all their 52 cards!

[sigmoid]

[Sheep-Goats]

It's not an intelligence isssue. It's the fact that they don't trust their own English more than what's in the book.

In most of my classes I let them do an activity like this and then demonstrate how their copying has caused them to fail at the task. This is a much more effective way to curtail this behavior than to build the task so that they know not to do it in the first place.

Thai students are notorious for copying a whole page of text from a webpage for a writing assingment and then changing one or two sentences and calling it good.

[TawtViet]

Thanks for waking me up everyone. I guess I'm experiencing a universal JHS thing. JHS was too long ago for me to remember. In those long ago days I was compliant far above the average.