Paraphrasing challenges faced by Malaysian ESL students

Abstract

This study examined the challenges faced by Malaysian second language (L2) learners when paraphrasing an academic text. Drawing on interviews with two diploma students from two business majors, I explored the types of challenges they faced when attempting paraphrasing tasks. The findings revealed that the students faced multiple challenges that ranged from text comprehension, poor L2 proficiency to referencing problems. In addition, there were significant differences between paraphrasing strategies adopted by a competent student and one with a lower proficiency level. Overall, the findings suggest that there is a need to utilise Content-Based Instruction to make the links between writing skills and learners’ disciplines tangible and that pre-degree preparation needs to include extensive writing practice which would help students become familiar with academic writing demands. Preliminary results also show that there is a need for teachers to be aware that the design of the materials for English language teaching should be tailored to the purpose of university study and academic vocabulary.

Difficulties of Summarizing and Paraphrasing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL): Saudi Graduate Students’ Perspectives

“…Adi Badiozaman (2014) interviewed two Malaysian L2 students who were taking a diploma program in Business to investigate the difficulties that they encountered when paraphrasing source materials. Students in Adi Badiozaman (2014) study reported copious challenges that they faced when it came to paraphrasing.…”

“…These two studies, Flores and Lopez (2019) and Adi Badiozaman (2014), are of great significance as they mark initial attempts to enhance our understanding of the sources of struggles for students when it comes to paraphrasing and summarizing. However, the students who reported such difficulties were pursuing either their bachelor degrees or diploma degrees.…”

“…Despite their indispensability for successful academic writing, ESL students and EFL students encounter various challenges when trying to use summaries and paraphrases in their universities' requirements (Adi Badiozaman, 2014;Flores & Lopez, 2019). These include difficulties at the language level (for example, finding an appropriate synonymy), difficulties at the level of reading comprehension (e.g., identifying main ideas in the text), and finally, difficulties related to documentation skills (citation and referencing, for example).…”

Students’ Paraphrasing in the Literature Review Section of Research Proposal

“…Essentially, paraphrasing refers to the process of re-delivering the ideas in one's own language. Several researchers defined paraphrasing as the act of restating information by integrating the linguistics features (the semantic and syntactic component) such as synonym substitution, changing the word form, and re-arrange the sentence structure (Kissner, 2006;Badiozaman, 2014). In addition, Driscoll and Brizee (2011) label the term paraphrasing as "your own rendition of essential information and ideas expressed by someone else, presented in a new form" (para.2).…”

“…According to Bailey (2006), "paraphrasing involves changing a text so that it is quite different from the source, while retaining the meaning" (p. 29). Thus, writers must be able to demonstrate an in-depth understanding toward a text before they start to paraphrase certain passage, consider the writers' engagement to the reading passage text (Barry, 2006;Ho, 2010;Liao & Tseng, 2010;Sun, 2012;Badiozaman, 2014). This aims to produce accurate results of paraphrasing by retaining the message from the original excerpt (Badiozaman, 2014)…”