Paraphrasing is a key skill for EAP students, and there are numerous techniques and tools that they can use to help them paraphrase. Whether they use these tools effectively to produce good paraphrases, though, is another question. A question, in fact, that Carol Bailey and Judi Withers at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) investigated in detail. This article is the report on their study, with its interesting findings and some useful take-aways for EAP teachers.
Context & Research
Bailey and Withers noticed students making poor use of helpful tools (e.g. within Microsoft Word), and use of unhelpful tools (e.g. online translators), when attempting to paraphrase ideas from other sources. To investigate exactly how their students went about paraphrasing and using these tools, they employed screen-capture software and brief interviews.
The 20 participants involved in the study were students in the UK at levels from undergraduate to PhD, and aged between 19 and 51. Twelve were speakers of English as an Additional Language (EAL).
Participants were asked to paraphrase a 90-word Wikipedia text (with a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 12-12.2, understandable to EAL students with IELTS 5.5 or above) using Microsoft Word. The texts were on the topics of cell phone use and CCTV monitoring, which were thought to be of interest to the students and general enough to be understood by non-experts.
Data & Findings
Everything the student did relevant to the task was recorded as a video using screen-capture software, and subsequently coded. Some example coded actions include: typing, self-correcting, and using external sources. Actions such as using Word’s grammar check, synonym finder, thesaurus*, or spellcheck were also coded. The final product, i.e. the student’s paraphrase, was then assessed for quality as a paraphrase, looking at sufficiently changed phrasing, equivalence in meaning to the original, and overall coherence.
Collated data shows that students used tools a total of 244 times. They spent just under 19 minutes on the task on average, with each student using software tools an average of 10.9 times. By far the most commonly used tools were Word’s spellcheck function (84 times) and synonym finder function (56 times).
The detailed coding allowed Bailey and Withers to see whether the student self-corrected after using Word’s tools to highlight potential mistakes, or relied on the suggested corrections. Students self-corrected 36% of the time in response to Word flagging a spelling mistake and 19% of the time in response to a flagged grammar mistake, for example. More often, the students interacted with the tool to get tips for correcting their work where a spelling or grammar error was flagged. In some cases, the actions captured in the videos showed that the student was unable to correct the mistake effectively, even with the ‘advice’ of the programme. This was the case when Word did not make a clear suggestion for rewording (e.g. “Fragment: Consider revising”) or when something had been mistyped in a way that Word did not recognise, for example.
Regarding students’ use of the synonym finder tool, over half of the cases in Bailey and Withers’ study show the student right-clicking on a word in the original text in order to find a synonym which they then copied into their paraphrase. They report a success rate of only 34% where the student selected a suitable synonym from the list of suggestions. In these cases, the students were deemed to have been discerning in their use of the tool as the synonym they chose to insert into their text was not at the top of Word’s list of suggestions. In other cases, though, students simply chose the word at the top of the list, and this was often incorrect, either in meaning or in terms of colligation, resulting in sentences that ranged from amusing to incomprehensible.
Discussion
The findings here highlight some major individual differences in proficiency with the electronic tools available. Bailey and Withers therefore advocate training students to use the basic helpful functions of a word processing programme and opening up dialogue about how they can be used effectively. They emphasise that the aim should be “to discourage the indiscriminate and mechanical use of … substitution” in paraphrasing (p. 184), and suggest this training should focus on word class distinction, collocation and colligation.
To enable students to paraphrase more effectively in future, Bailey and Withers also mention some other tools that students could be shown how to use, including learners’ dictionaries, Grammarly, Phil Edmond’s JustTheWord collocation finder, Google searches (to see examples of a word or phrase in use), and translation software based on corpora (e.g. https://www.linguee.com/ for English-German). However, they highlight the need for students to be selective about which software and functions they work with. They also recommend students writing ‘on their own’ for a first draft and only employing such tools when they get to the stage of revising their text, rather than trying to use the tools at the time when they should be thinking above the surface level and constructing their text.
As an interesting final question, Bailey and Withers ask: Does using such tools make for a better paraphrasing? A statistical analysis of the data collected here revealed a non-significant and very weak correlation between using tools more and writing a better paraphrase. Individual data contradicts, this, however, as the student who wrote the best paraphrase used tools only four times, for example, and of two other students who scored the same (8/10 points) for their paraphrases, one used tools five times and the other 43. This again would seem to highlight the need to move students away from thinking of a paraphrase as simply ‘the same sentence with different words substituted in’ and towards thinking of paraphrasing as ‘expressing the same meaning in your own way entirely.’
My conclusion
It’s all too easy to think of students these days as fully computer literate, but this study highlights just how wrong this assumption could be, especially when students are using electronic tools to write in their L2. It would perhaps have been nice to read about differences between proficient English speakers and English learners, but overall the research findings serve as a nice reminder of the support that teachers of writing should provide, as well as giving some tips that can be passed on to students.
Reference
Bailey, C. & J. Withers, “What Can Screen Capture Reveal About Students’ Use of Software Tools When Undertaking a Paraphrasing Task?”, Journal of Academic Writing, Vol. 8 No 2, Winter 2018, pages 176-190. http://dx.doi.org/10.18552/joaw.456
*In Microsoft Word, Synonym finder: right click on a word and select ‘Synonyms’ from the drop-down menu. Thesaurus: press Shift + F7, or select it from the toolbar menu.
