I've spent a lot of the past few days marking students' paraphrases, which has led to me wanting to share a few of my thoughts about paraphrasing and how I teach it to my English language learners (or ELLs).
What is a paraphrase?
Before getting started, I need to make sure we're all on the same page regarding what a paraphrase is. To do this for my students I came up with a PowerPoint presentation titled "Fatima and the Curse of the Copied Plagiarism." The tautology is intentional. I wanted the title to have the feel of an old Doctor Who serial (like "The Deadly Assassin" or "The Curse of the Fatal Death", though I'm pretty sure none of my students get the reference). The presentation ends up being essentially a story instead of the usual, dry point-by-point the students expect. I actually got the idea to make it a story after attending a presentation titled "Storytelling: Motivating Students and Building Rapport" at TESOL Arabia in March 2012. I went to this particular presentation not realizing that the intended audience was elementary and preschool teachers. Still, I like attending professional development where I'm not necessarily a part of the target audience since it gives me perspectives I wouldn't normally get. Also, the presentation involved a lot of puppets and songs, so what's not to like?
In my particular story, Fatima is a student who has to write an essay which integrates sources, but she simply copies and pastes them into her essay. Her teacher returns the paper with a failing grade, telling her she plagiarized someone else's work and needs to paraphrase. So she tries rewriting the section by changing a few words with synonyms (which is actually probably the main strategy my students use), but the teacher says this is still plagiarism. She then tries to rearrange the structure, but keeps all the same words. She's told again that this is still plagiarism. Finally, she rewrites the whole passage with different words and structures, but the meaning is completely lost. The teacher says that this time it isn't plagiarism, but it still isn't correct, explaining that a good paraphrase does the following:
After this, I like to emphasize just how difficult this is for someone whose first language is not English. I ask my students to consider what skills they need to have. First of all, they need strong reading comprehension skills so that they can understand the meaning of the original text in order to maintain it in their own writing. Next, they need a large enough vocabulary that they can change the author's original words to their own. They also need to have a strong understanding of grammar so that they can rearrange the sentence and have it still be grammatically correct.
After emphasizing how difficult paraphrasing is, I like to completely switch directions and let them know it is actually something very easy that they do all the time without thinking about. Students generally have a large disconnect between what goes on in the classroom and their real lives. I ask them "How often do you paraphrase in your lives?", and their answers generally go something like "only when we're writing in class." I then ask how often a friend or a family member asks them to share a message with someone else, which of course is fairly often.
"Do you write it down and make sure the message is word for word the same as the original?" I ask. They say, no, of course not. They just say it in their own words.
"Do you spend a few minutes before thinking about synonyms you're going to use, consulting a thesaurus if necessary, and work out how you're going to change the structure?" This usually makes them laugh because it would obviously be absurd to do, which proves my point. People paraphrase all the time in speech without even thinking about it. If they can just transfer this skill to academic writing, their task will be a lot easier.
The first step is understanding the original message
So the first step in paraphrasing is to read and understand the message, which for many of my students is already too difficult. I frequently get paraphrases written from students where the sentence will mirror the text more or less word for word, except certain words (often keys words) will be omitted. Perhaps something like this:
Original: One of the principle causes of obesity is that the population does not exercise sufficiently.
Paraphrase: One of the principle of obesity is people not exercise.
Reading this, it seems very clear to me that the student does not understand the message, since they felt like the words "causes" and "sufficiently" could simply be removed from the text. Many students are further along, though, and do understand the text as written. To them, the next step should be to cover up the original text and try to put what they remember into their own words. This is to make it more like the oral paraphrasing that they're already used to doing. Nevertheless, I feel like most of my students ignore this advice and prefer to take a more analytical approach where they are looking at the text while they rearrange it.
The next step is putting it into their own words
I like the simplicity of the heading I just wrote, "The next step is putting it in their own words." Our textbook has a step-by-step paraphrasing checklist which more or less does the same thing, making it sound like putting it into their own words is so simple that it doesn't require further explanation. Of course, it really could be split up into five or six smaller steps because at this point students have to change the grammar and vocabulary to make the paraphrase retain the original meaning but be in their own words. Of the two, it seems like my students always try to change the vocabulary in the original with synonyms more than changing the grammar, but I feel like native speakers often do the opposite and change the grammar more than the vocabulary. Here's why. I go to thesaurus.com with my students and show them a list of synonyms for the word "education:"
Now, while all of these words mean more or less the same as education, native speakers can easily sense the differences in meaning for all of them. For instance, if the original phrase were "foreign language education in the Middle East," very few of these would be acceptable substitutes. In fact, many of these would be quite humorous, ("foreign language brainwashing" or "foreign language proselytism"). "Teaching" and "learning" are probably the closest, but to me at least, neither on its own completely captures everything that the word "education" does. It's for reasons like this that I think native speakers are more likely to change the part of speech of a word and change the sentence structure than to use a synonym. That isn't to say that native speakers don't use synonyms, I just think they use them more selectively than students who are learning the language.
The other point I make to the students at this point is that just as their parents used to tell them to not talk to strangers, they should not use words that are strangers in their writing, which is something they frequently do either from a thesaurus or Google translate. You wouldn't get into a car with a stranger, and a phrase like "foreign language indoctrination" shouldn't end up in your writing.
So, to summarize, here are my main points:
What is a paraphrase?
Before getting started, I need to make sure we're all on the same page regarding what a paraphrase is. To do this for my students I came up with a PowerPoint presentation titled "Fatima and the Curse of the Copied Plagiarism." The tautology is intentional. I wanted the title to have the feel of an old Doctor Who serial (like "The Deadly Assassin" or "The Curse of the Fatal Death", though I'm pretty sure none of my students get the reference). The presentation ends up being essentially a story instead of the usual, dry point-by-point the students expect. I actually got the idea to make it a story after attending a presentation titled "Storytelling: Motivating Students and Building Rapport" at TESOL Arabia in March 2012. I went to this particular presentation not realizing that the intended audience was elementary and preschool teachers. Still, I like attending professional development where I'm not necessarily a part of the target audience since it gives me perspectives I wouldn't normally get. Also, the presentation involved a lot of puppets and songs, so what's not to like?
PowerPoint Slide
In my particular story, Fatima is a student who has to write an essay which integrates sources, but she simply copies and pastes them into her essay. Her teacher returns the paper with a failing grade, telling her she plagiarized someone else's work and needs to paraphrase. So she tries rewriting the section by changing a few words with synonyms (which is actually probably the main strategy my students use), but the teacher says this is still plagiarism. She then tries to rearrange the structure, but keeps all the same words. She's told again that this is still plagiarism. Finally, she rewrites the whole passage with different words and structures, but the meaning is completely lost. The teacher says that this time it isn't plagiarism, but it still isn't correct, explaining that a good paraphrase does the following:
- it uses the student's own WORDS,
- it uses the student's own SENTENCE STRUCTURE,
- it has the exact same MEANING as the original,
- and it includes a REFERENCE to the original author.
After this, I like to emphasize just how difficult this is for someone whose first language is not English. I ask my students to consider what skills they need to have. First of all, they need strong reading comprehension skills so that they can understand the meaning of the original text in order to maintain it in their own writing. Next, they need a large enough vocabulary that they can change the author's original words to their own. They also need to have a strong understanding of grammar so that they can rearrange the sentence and have it still be grammatically correct.
After emphasizing how difficult paraphrasing is, I like to completely switch directions and let them know it is actually something very easy that they do all the time without thinking about. Students generally have a large disconnect between what goes on in the classroom and their real lives. I ask them "How often do you paraphrase in your lives?", and their answers generally go something like "only when we're writing in class." I then ask how often a friend or a family member asks them to share a message with someone else, which of course is fairly often.
"Do you write it down and make sure the message is word for word the same as the original?" I ask. They say, no, of course not. They just say it in their own words.
"Do you spend a few minutes before thinking about synonyms you're going to use, consulting a thesaurus if necessary, and work out how you're going to change the structure?" This usually makes them laugh because it would obviously be absurd to do, which proves my point. People paraphrase all the time in speech without even thinking about it. If they can just transfer this skill to academic writing, their task will be a lot easier.
The first step is understanding the original message
So the first step in paraphrasing is to read and understand the message, which for many of my students is already too difficult. I frequently get paraphrases written from students where the sentence will mirror the text more or less word for word, except certain words (often keys words) will be omitted. Perhaps something like this:
Original: One of the principle causes of obesity is that the population does not exercise sufficiently.
Paraphrase: One of the principle of obesity is people not exercise.
Reading this, it seems very clear to me that the student does not understand the message, since they felt like the words "causes" and "sufficiently" could simply be removed from the text. Many students are further along, though, and do understand the text as written. To them, the next step should be to cover up the original text and try to put what they remember into their own words. This is to make it more like the oral paraphrasing that they're already used to doing. Nevertheless, I feel like most of my students ignore this advice and prefer to take a more analytical approach where they are looking at the text while they rearrange it.
The next step is putting it into their own words
I like the simplicity of the heading I just wrote, "The next step is putting it in their own words." Our textbook has a step-by-step paraphrasing checklist which more or less does the same thing, making it sound like putting it into their own words is so simple that it doesn't require further explanation. Of course, it really could be split up into five or six smaller steps because at this point students have to change the grammar and vocabulary to make the paraphrase retain the original meaning but be in their own words. Of the two, it seems like my students always try to change the vocabulary in the original with synonyms more than changing the grammar, but I feel like native speakers often do the opposite and change the grammar more than the vocabulary. Here's why. I go to thesaurus.com with my students and show them a list of synonyms for the word "education:"
Now, while all of these words mean more or less the same as education, native speakers can easily sense the differences in meaning for all of them. For instance, if the original phrase were "foreign language education in the Middle East," very few of these would be acceptable substitutes. In fact, many of these would be quite humorous, ("foreign language brainwashing" or "foreign language proselytism"). "Teaching" and "learning" are probably the closest, but to me at least, neither on its own completely captures everything that the word "education" does. It's for reasons like this that I think native speakers are more likely to change the part of speech of a word and change the sentence structure than to use a synonym. That isn't to say that native speakers don't use synonyms, I just think they use them more selectively than students who are learning the language.
The other point I make to the students at this point is that just as their parents used to tell them to not talk to strangers, they should not use words that are strangers in their writing, which is something they frequently do either from a thesaurus or Google translate. You wouldn't get into a car with a stranger, and a phrase like "foreign language indoctrination" shouldn't end up in your writing.
So, to summarize, here are my main points:
- Paraphrasing is a natural skill that students use all the time in their first languages. If the students can transfer that skill to their writing, paraphrasing will be much easier for them.
- Reading comprehension is a skill that has to come before paraphrasing. If students don't have strong reading comprehension skills, the task will be impossibly difficult.
- Language learners try to use synonyms more often than native speakers. They can certainly do this when appropriate, but they need more explicit instruction in how to change the parts of speech of a word and how to change the sentence structure without affecting the meaning.
- Students should not use words that are strangers unless they want to make their teacher secretly laugh at their writing.
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