Teacher Developer Gaby Lawson provides a brief overview of the importance of paraphrasing, the steps to follow for effective paraphrasing and tips for teachers developing the skill with their class.
What is plagiarism?
One of the most important skills we can help learners within EAP is helping them to avoid plagiarism. This will help set them up for their future university course. First, learners and teachers need to think about what plagiarism is. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines ‘plagiarize’ as ‘to use another person’s ideas or work and pretend it is your own.’ More than just pretending, many people even see plagiarism as being similar to stealing. Griggs (2016) reports that with the rise in numbers of international students at American universities, the number of charges of plagiarism has increased. However, he concludes that ideas of plagiarism may be cultural. Certainly, Alistair Pennycook (1996) noted that the notion that ownership of texts is a western idea. As a result, as teachers and markers, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions of intentional wrong-doing.
The takeaway for teachers is to realise that our students may not understand that by ‘borrowing words’ they are plagiarising. As a result, a big part of our job is to help them understand that it is essential to acknowledge the ideas of others when writing academically.
The penalties for plagiarism can be quite harsh. At Monash University, for example, if a faculty believes the plagiarism was unintentional, the result can be the loss of marks or a requirement to resubmit. In more serious cases, where the faculty believes the plagiarism was intentional or reckless, the results could include the work not being assessed, receiving a 0 grade for the unit, or potential expulsion.
Paraphrasing is the answer
Strong paraphrasing skills will set learners up for success in their university courses. Many universities have adopted the software Turnitin. This popular software is used to check its enormous database for similar texts. Keep in mind though – it recognises patterns but it isn’t perfect. Turnitin can’t interpret results, so more investigation by assessors is usually necessary. As a result, students need to be able to paraphrase their academic writing in order to do their assignments.
What exactly is paraphrasing?
Paraphrasing is repeating something in written or spoken words. We paraphrase to show our understanding, to be humourous, to retell a story, or to summarize ideas from something we’ve just heard for others often using reported speech. We use paraphrasing as a way of developing our shared understanding of ideas with others.
One way to improve student confidence and ability is to start the lesson each day with a very simple jigsaw text (keep it simple to make it achievable and not time-consuming) which they have to summarize and paraphrase for the group. You can put possible answers up on the board for students who like to have a model answer, or learners can negotiate the meanings depending on the cultural expectations of your class.
Teaching and learning paraphrasing is particularly challenging in the EAP classroom. Often, students misunderstand or underestimate how much of the original text they need to change. It is very difficult for students who are entry-level B1 (IELTS 5.0-5.5) to paraphrase as they often do not have more than one way to express an idea in English. Paraphrasing is a lot of skills within a skill – it is more of a toolkit than a tool. There are many skills within paraphrasing in terms of grammar and vocabulary use.
Steps to paraphrasing
If your EAP class needs to paraphrase a text, here are suggested steps to paraphrase the example sentence “Online learning is popular” said John Loughran, Dean of Education at Monash University in 2017.
- Use an English-English Advanced learners’ dictionary: there are many online dictionaries but only an Advanced Learner’s one provides the range of tools learners need: phonology, nearby words, extra examples, countable or uncountable, collocations etc.
- If the students want to paraphrase a word like ‘popular’ ask students to use the Advanced Learners’ dictionary definition which is ‘many people like it’ instead of trying to think of a synonym and coming up with ‘famous’ which has a different meaning.
- ‘popular’ can be paraphrased as ‘liked by many people’.
- By this point, the paraphrase is “Many people like online learning.” Often, at this point students will look for synonyms for ‘online learning’; however, key terms need to remain unchanged or the meaning of the sentence could be lost.
- In order to further paraphrase, learners could change the grammar. For example, the sentence could be put into the passive voice. “Online learning is liked by many people”. Changing the grammar structure is a stronger paraphrase.
- Finally an in-text reference with a reporting verb could be added so the paraphrase finally reads:
- Loughran (2017) states that “Online learning is liked by many people.”
- This will create a clearer paraphrase for both the reader and the writer.
Tips for teaching paraphrasing
Here are some other useful tips for effective teaching and learning of paraphrasing:
- Little and often: regularly ask students to paraphrase single sentences as warmers or small activities during the lesson.
- Paraphrase in groups: group work and team work is most effective if the task is too difficult for the individuals but they can solve it as a team according to Eric Mazur’s method of ‘peer instruction’.
- Use Google Docs for team paraphrase: if your students have laptops, put the parapraph you want them to paraphrase onto a Google Doc and ask them to do it in teams.
- Use examples from their target topic: if your students are going to be writing on principles of web design, use texts about web design; if they are writing about CLT, use texts about CLT etc. It is helpful to practice with the target vocabulary.
Paraphrasing is an essential skill for EAP students because they need it for academic work and the accuracy demands are quite high. But more than this, paraphrasing is an essential part of functioning language: it helps us to share our understanding, tell funny stories, and clarify things we haven’t understood in everyday language.
Teachers can support learners in developing better paraphrasing skills by breaking down grammar and developing their vocabulary, also practising little and often in communicative class activities. Plagiarism is a culturally specific idea, so as English language teachers if students plagiarise, we need to see it as a need for not only a bigger language toolkit but cultural education. Importantly, a good quality English-English Advanced Learner’s dictionary is an essential tool for being able to produce academic writing independently.
References
Grigg, A. 2008 ‘Chinese international students and faculty members’ views on plagiarism in higher education’ Ph.D. thesis, Walden University, Minnesota.
Lambert, C. 2012, ‘Twilight of the lecture’, Harvard Magazine,. March-April, [online] Available at: https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twighlight-of-the-lecture, viewed 13 March 2018.
Pennycook, A 2016 ‘Reflecting on borrowed words’ TESOL Quarterly, vol 50, no 2, pp. 480-482.
Schell, J ‘Eric Mazur wins first ever Minerva Prize for advancements in higher education,’ Weblog post, May 20, 2014, viewed 13 March 2018, https://blog.peerinstruction.net/2014/05/20/eric-mazur-wins-first-ever-minerva-prize-for-advancements-in-higher-education/