This week will start a few exercise that help ESL students learn English paraphrase writing. This will involve several writing and knowledge skills including nominalisations, synonyms and appositives.
What is Paraphrase Writing?
Paraphrasing is a reading and writing skill. Read a sentence or paragraph and then write the same ideas using your words.
Paraphrasing is not copying. Good paraphrasing shows you understand other people’s ideas and can write them in a way that makes sense to you.
Paraphrasing Helps Writing
Paraphrasing helps build writing skills in many areas. In this e-course, the English lessons will help you to:
- improve vocabulary power
- learn different sentence patterns
- expand knowledge of expressions
- develop your own writing style
Paraphrase writing is an important reading and writing skill for students in almost every English-speaking country. It’s hard to write a good high school or university essay without paraphrasing skills. Believe me, I know.
Research and Results
I believe paraphrasing is a great writing skill. Other people agree. Here’s an example.
A paraphrasing test was done by the University of Kansas in the United States. Researchers found that students improved reading comprehension after learning paraphrasing skills.
Before learning how to paraphrase, students were given a reading comprehension test. Their test score was 48 percent. After learning how to paraphrase, the reading score went up to 84 percent. That’s a big increase. (Some details about the research are available here.
Writing Exercise 2
This is a challenging exercise.
- Watch and listen to this video.
- Describe the setting, character and plot with your partner.
- Describe the meaning or the story, if any.
Room 8 from Bombay Sapphire on Vimeo.