The Influence of Teaching Strategies on Students’ Paraphrasing Strategies: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of teaching strategies on the paraphrasing skills of English-as-second-language learners. Data for this study was obtained from the teacher using reflective journals that were kept for the duration of the course. Studies have shown that keeping reflective journals helps teachers construct meaningful and effective teaching strategies. In this study the teacher’s observations of his students’ performances and comments about summary writing were recorded in weekly journals and then analysed. The results showed that the use of content-driven teaching strategies affected students’ acquisition of the paraphrasing skills taught. Students were found to perform better on the summary writing tests when teachers used content-driven teaching strategies. They also did better with a contextually unfamiliar passage than a passage with a familiar context if the main points were more direct and accessible. This further implies that apart from teaching strategies, the nature of a passage could influence students’ performances in summary writing. Further investigation is needed on the influence of the types of passages on students’ performance when paraphrasing.