Textual borrowing strategy

In the article “The use of paraphrase in summary writing: a comparison of L1 and L2 writers” written by Casey Keck in English Department, PO Box 6032, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011, United States, the author mentions that “paraphrasing is considered by many to be an important skill for academic writing, and some have argued that the teaching of paraphrasing might help students avoid copying from source texts. Few studies, however, have investigated the ways in which both L1 and L2 academic writers already use paraphrasing as a textual borrowing strategy when completing their academic assignments.” So the author does a study to further understand university students’ paraphrasing strategies.

The methods the author used is to analyze L1 and L2 writers’ use of paraphrase within a summary task and the author also develop a method for classifying these paraphrases into four major Paraphrase Types: Near Copy, Minimal Revision, Moderate Revision, and Substantial Revision. After comparing the L1 and L2 writers’ use of these Paraphrase Types, the author discovered though both groups used about five paraphrases in a summary, L2 writers used more Near Copies than L1 writers. By contrast, the summaries of L1 writers used more Moderate and Substantial Revisions than the L2 writers. And based on the comparison, there is an important issue worth to be discussed about students’ textual borrowing strategies because L2 writers use much more Near Copies in their summary. And this issue also can be linked to plagiarism and how to teach paraphrase in university.

In my opinion, paraphrasing appears to be a major way for summary writing at the college level. And in the article the author also points out those participants mostly are in the first year of their university, so the first-year composition courses usually serve students with paraphrasing when summary skills are introduced. So, actually, the most important thing is the instructor should design writing programs to teach students how to paraphrase well, because one important function of the paraphrase is to help a writer rewrite other author’s ideas without copying them exactly. And this is an essential skill for students to do summary writing.

Besides, according to this study or other studies, “While most L1 writers did not use Near Copy paraphrases in their summaries, most L2 writers used at least one, and half used two or more.” and “Chinese participants (also university students) used nearly copied strings of the original text more frequently than English speakers.” Therefore, how to instruct students, especially for L2, about correct idea for textual borrowing strategy becomes a very necessary and important thing. If there is a future research to provide more information, I think the instructor can begin to find out specific paraphrasing strategies to help L1 andL2 writers not to mistake copying as a textual borrowing strategy and help university students become confident and successful academic writers.