Abstract:

Paraphrasing is generally considered to be an essential skill for scientific writing, however only few studies have explored how paraphrasing is used in second language writing. The study focuses on the paraphrasing strategies employed by first-year second-language PhD students (n = 69) of a technical university when completing a writing assignment. The students were given a task to write a summary (150-200 words) of an introduction to an authentic scientific paper written by native English speakers (374 words) during 45 minutes. In the first stage of the study, we aimed to identify instances of paraphrasing and classify them in terms of the quality of paraphrase. Following Keck’s (2006) methodology, paraphrases from student-generated summaries were divided into near copies, minimally revised texts, moderately revised texts, and substantially revised texts. Taking into consideration the specificity of second language scientific writing, another category was added – misinterpretations, which revealed how second-language students’ texts differ from the original text by adding new information and thus changing the overall meaning. In the second stage, we looked at the types of transformations used by students in paraphrases: lexico-semantic, grammatical or structural. In the third stage, a survey was conducted to analyze the students’ opinion of the task and the strategies they used to do the writing assignment. The qualitative analysis of student-generated texts revealed that the most widely used categories were minimally and moderately revised texts, and the most commonly employed transformations were lexico-semantic; moreover, at times the original idea of the source text was misinterpreted. It was shown that most of the students found the task quite challenging, as they had to find other ways of expressing the same idea without copying phrases from the source text. The study contributes to the current knowledge of paraphrase use in academic writing and offers insights into scientific writing pedagogy.

Keywords:

Paraphrasing, scientific writing, second language writing, summary, misinterpretation.