A Study on the Effects of Teaching Paraphrasing to Foreign University Students

외국인 학부생을 위한 바꿔 쓰기 교육의 효과

This research aims to evaluate the effects and the shortcomings of strategies for teaching paraphrasing to foreign university students. For this study, the effects of teaching paraphrasing skills on student's academic writing was investigated through the assessment of pre- and post-test writing tasks and through a focus group interview. The teaching of paraphrasing was divided into 3 instructional sessions and the focus group interview was conducted at the end of the last session. After each instructional session three trained assessors evaluated the outcomes of pre and post task writings; the in-depth focus group interviews were conducted on seven of the students in order to define better positive effects as well as shortcomings. By comparing the scores of pre- and post-task assignments it is possible to affirm that there is a meaningful difference for overall scores; moreover, in an analysis conducted on each single sub-element of the paraphrasing skill, it emerged that except for "task completion", all other four elements of "structure", "understanding core content", "change of expression" and "academic expressions" showed a statistically significant improvement in performance. On the other hand, as a result of the focus group interview, it was possible to individuate as main shortcomings insufficient vocabulary knowledge, poor overall comprehension of the reference material, lack of practice and difficulty in connect sentences organically. It is possible to consider these elements as limiting factors in understanding the reference material and making correct citations by the students. Therefore, we suggest as supplementary instructional strategies a deeper attention to the difficulty level of the text, the introduction of devices to understand better the content of the reference material and an integrated practice of the paraphrasing skill.