Job Discussion Forums

[spiral78]

I imagine that those of us who work with academic writing, particularly at the university level, are aware of the difficulty paraphrasing accurately can pose. Honestly, it's a difficult skill even for native speakers - as I was recently reminded on another thread here in which a native speaker paraphrased a statement of mine with a notable degree of inaccuracy in terms of meaning.

As I am currently working on a unit for students who need to consider effective and accurate paraphrasing for upcoming work, I'd be interested to know what kinds of approaches the rest of you take to this problem.

Here are some of the things I am doing:

Using audio clips (no more than two or three sentences long) and asking students to paraphrase these, on the premise that if they can't see the text, they may be more successful at actually altering sentence structure and content words rather than just substituting a few words. It does seem to be a useful step.

Showing the classes papers in which poorly-paraphrased passages were considered 'plagiarism' by the computer system that checks for this at the university. We compare the poor paraphrases to the original passages and analyse where the student writer went wrong.

Working to help students build a field-appropriate vocabulary, focusing particularly on adjectives, verbs, and nouns - and helping them analyse the cases in which nouns cannot be replaced.

Other ideas?

Basically, those of us who are working to develop this unit are of the opinion that strong paraphrasing (like strong academic writing overall) is a developed skills, but we do hope to get students off to a strong start on what is clearly a difficult aspect of successful writing.

[Sashadroogie]

Dictogloss. Basically the same thing as you mentioned above with audio clips.

TOEFL paraphrasing exercises work well enough - even for workshop sessions with native speaker teachers who lack this skill.

[Glenski]

Dictogloss is not for teaching paraphrasing. It is for getting students to write/construct word-for-word sentences from dictation.

I would hesitate to use audio clips for any sort of written work, but it's interesting to see that you seem to have some measure of success with that, spiral. More details would be nice. I just imagine that (as with Sasha's dictogloss example), the main problem one runs into would be the simple fact that students have listening problems equal to or greater than their writing weaknesses.

Also, teaching paraphrasing is something for academic writing work, not something that is spoken, so unless you have audio of someone speaking (unnaturally) academically written material, I see it as having only limited value.

My own students are far too low to teach paraphrasing, even when they get into grad school. There was 1 or 2 presentations at a JALT annual conference in the past 2-3 years where I saw someone describe an exercise which seemed to provide a margin of support and success.

This might have been one of them.
http://jalt-publications.org/tlt/issues/2008-03_32.3
I do not have access to my other JALT files right now, so I can't search for the other talk. Essentially (and to no surprise), teaching paraphrasing is a mind-numbingly tough process. The talk I recall showed how he taught students step by step how to substitute words or expressions with synonyms, and to choose the ones that actually could be substituted without loss of meaning. That's the key, of course, but if I recall correctly, even one 90-minute lesson drained students and teacher with repetitive exercises to pound this in.

Can't help you with plagiarism. I edit a scientific journal at my uni and have had to chastise professors from doing that! Think of what they let their students get away with.

[spiral78]

[Sashadroogie]

Sorry, Glenski, but what you have described resembles pure dictation. The 'gloss' part of dictogloss means paraphrasing.

[artemisia]

My general English students (supposedly high level) are preparing for eventual tertiary studies. They frequently lack the most basic of academic skills; they don�t seem to know how to study, for example. When they initially arrive in my class, many don�t recognise the difference between sentences and notes and later struggle to produce the latter. They continue to �think out� (translate) their thoughts by writing full (but not always accurate) sentences in English. Unsurprisingly, they have trouble identifying key words and key ideas in a text which makes summarising a challenging task. Likewise most haven�t got a clue how to go about planning for a writing task � they don�t seem to have done it before. Even though many have already studied at uni, I suspect some would possibly have trouble producing a well-rounded piece of writing in their own language on a topic arguing a particular point of view, while presenting all sides of an issue. As some are really young adults, I think this might partly be related to age but not exclusively so.

Once students are already at the point of being able to identify key points in a short text and note them down, I�ll sometimes get them to do that and then take their texts away so that they have to relate the main ideas to each other � verbally and then in written form. This works best for condensing information and summarising, I think, but the exercise could be further taken into chunks they could then practise paraphrasing verbally. I�ve used dictogloss as well, as a useful way of getting students to focus on and negotiate the meaning of a text in order to reproduce as much of the original as possible but obviously without the same wording.

I�ve found it useful to present a series of sentence structures they already know or are familiar with and get them to write and rewrite essentially the same sentence(s) so that it has the same meaning using all the different structures and then take this into paragraphs. This doesn�t explicitly deal with the issue of using too many of an original text�s key words/ phrases (copying) but I think it�s a help if students have a number of structures available they can actively call upon. Mostly my students just don�t come equipped with sufficient skills to work on something like paraphrasing and I�m also not really free to spend the amount of time I�d like to on writing and reading skills. I'd be able to this if it were solely an academic writing class but in view of where students are headed, I try and incorporate a focus on some skills.

[Glenski]

[desertdawg]

The audio thing sounds good.

For me even when teaching a high level skill, it can be useful to go back to basics.

Sounds like you have the time and manpower to go into this a bit. I would be constructing lesson plans to impress with a lot of thought on the mechanics of the lesson. PPP with emphasis on the latter two, addressing (as you have already) different learning styles.

One thing I did was use the computer in the class. The text was shown in full and the students given the task to produce a limited number of bullet points of limited length. Another was to get the students using highlighters to identify the key points. They also physically deconstructed a text with scissors and then had to "translate" a set number of phrases or sentences. Building up to the previous exercises could be done by reducing your input/help and using longer or more complex texts

I think a difficulty can be in finding authentic texts with easily identifiable key points which can be paraphrased. This might sound strange, but I think it is very difficult to "teach" people new study skills. Perhaps the above only address the first stage of paraphrasing which is maybe the easiest. Maybe a step by step approach is one way of encouraging learning. Hopefully through different types of practice they can pick it up, teaching themselves and acquiring the skill.

[spiral78]

Glenski, pm sent.

I can't send links to the official course or unit, as it legally belongs to the university where I worked a few years back. I have sent a link to a paper I wrote about it several years ago, when it was new and had only been piloted once. The course is now up for re-development and more time has been allocated for it.

As you don't teach academic writing at this level, I'm pretty sure this won't be directly useful to you, but you're welcome to review the description of the unit, of course.

[spiral78]

[desertdawg]

For me PPP is valid in most contexts as I understand the term (despite the negative connotations). The lead, be it a teacher/facilitator/participant gives a brief presentation explaining the task and perhaps "teaching" the point which is to be practiced.

I've worked with post-graduate native and non-native students on academic courses. To be honest, very often, with the limited amount of input you have, it is very hard to teach people new skills. Having said that working with mature students over a longer period of time in a language support capacity, I hope I achieved more.

As you have said, there is no more authentic material than a student's own work. Sometimes it might be poor in terms of content or structure. One exercise that works well is turning the tables and asking a student to paraphrase their own work. A reason has to be given and the expected result set. For example the vocabularly might be academically unsuitable. Identifying the parts of speech and using a thesaurus is good practice. Also thinking about the audience. Technical jargon may have to be dumbed down or explained for an educated general reader.

I am a firm believer in task-based learning. However when you go back to basics, paraphrasing is a series of steps. What I was trying to say is that tasks should address those steps. The old fashioned PPP provides a way to incorporate new fangled scaffolding and building blocks.

When trying to facilitate (acquired) learning, I believe you have to be reflective in your approach. Thinking about how you paraphrase yourself and coming up with tasks which will allow the students to develop those skills. Looking at the barriers individuals face and the stages they find easier. Perhaps by a team approach, strengths could be exploited.

Previous posters have said how difficult paraphrasing is. Perhaps our expectations have to be lowered and realistic learner outcomes set. From my British perspective, paraphrasing is mainly summarizing. Academically there is nothing wrong with a few short quotes. It proves you've at least had a look at the books in your bibliography. At undergraduate level I was encouraged to do this.

[spiral78]

I work in a British-dominated context so far as language styles and academic writing expectations. Of course, we allow quotes - sometimes it's simply impossible to state something 'better'!
Our guidelines stipulate References, not Bibliographies, but that's a detail.

The student leader in class does normally introduce the topic and task. 'Teaching' the point to be practiced needs to be implicit - via the tasks/materials, to meet the expectations of this particular institute. In other contexts, I have no particular objection to the occasional 'sage on the stage' role - it can obviously have some value in general!!

I'm not sure I would be very confident to use my own paraphrasing skills as a model to develop tasks. While I'm a reasonably successful writer, my style is very concentrated and intensive and may well not be necessary or desirable for writers with different strengths and weaknesses to mine.

[naturegirl321]

We just finished academic English in the spring (yea!) and are now on academic presentation. What I found helped for paraphrasing was first explaining why it was bad to simply copy without quotes or giving credit. Even though my students are at university and a good university, I'd say about 99% had never had to do a proper research paper that has a works cited / references / bilbilography at the end.

Then the second thing was explaining them about paraphrasing and using simple words. We did a lot with good and bad examples and asking why the bad ones were bad. Then they did a couple as a class, and finally in small groups.

OWL helped a lot with that section. I created a packet from OWL, simplified it and uploaded it tot he intranet so they could access it. I explained and then they were given an extract from a book, a magazine, and a website. They were given all the info they needed to write the bibliography as well. They had to do three things: paraphrase, cite something using quotes correctly, and create a bibliogrpahy. I went around the class and checked things individually and made sure they understood. Some peopel didn't, it was a completely new concept to them, but the other students helped them out.

It took a long time, but it was worth it. I just hope they use it in all their other classes too.

[spiral78]

'Explaining' is an approach that, as I've already mentioned, doesn't really fit into this particular course, but thanks.

We do provide OWL resources for student self-study as well. That can be really useful for those with the iniative to go into it, though we have style guide and writing manual in-house that is more directly applicable.

[naturegirl321]