ALESHINSKAYA E., KURNAYEV A. ACADEMIC WRITING AT A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF PARAPHRASING STRATEGIES. LIFELONG EDUCATION: The 21st Century.
2023. № 3 (43). DOI: 10.15393/j5.art.2023.8651


Issue 3 (43)

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ACADEMIC WRITING AT A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF PARAPHRASING STRATEGIES

ALESHINSKAYA Evgeniya V.
PhD in Philological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages
National Research Nuclear University MEPhI
(Moscow, Russian Federation)
evaleshinskaya@mephi.ru
KURNAYEV Alexander A.
Senior Lecturer of the Department of Foreign Languages
National Research Nuclear University MEPhI
(Moscow, Russian Federation)
aakurnayev@mephi.ru
Keywords:
paraphrasing
academic language
academic writing
second language (L2) teaching
higher education.		 Abstract: the formation of paraphrasing skills is of utmost importance in teaching academic writing in a foreign (second) language to PhD students of a technical, as well as any other, university. The present study explores the paraphrasing strategies employed by first-year second language (L2) PhD students (n = 22) of MEPhI when completing a writing assignment. The qualitative analysis of the student-generated summaries of a fragment from an academic paper revealed weaknesses in L2 students’ paraphrases including the underrepresentation of substantially revised texts, overrepresenta-tion of lexico-semantic transformations and misinterpretation of the original meaning of the source text. The results of the survey demonstrated that the majority of the students experienced difficulties when trying to find other ways of expressing the same idea without copying directly from the source text. The study enables a better understanding of paraphrase use in L2 academic writing.
Paper submitted on: 05/16/2024; Accepted on: 08/25/2023; Published online on: 09/26/2023.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15393/j5.art.2023.8651