Academic writing at a technical university: a qualitative study of paraphrasing strategies

Paraphrasing is generally considered to be an essential skill for scientific writing. Paraphrasing is crucial for mindful borrowing of other authors’ ideas while writing a literature review and for providing evidence of the relevance and novelty of scientific research. Several authors have explored how mastering various paraphrasing techniques allows writers to avoid plagiarism and focused on various strategies employed by students at different levels to reproduce original texts in their own words. Thus, Kettel and DeFauw [1] presented the «Read, Reread, List, Compose» (RRLC) strategy to write from a bulleted list of words or phrases containing the most essential details of the source text. Keck [2] identified the main grammatical strategies of paraphrase and emphasized that further investigation into such practices will enable a better understanding of ways to avoid plagiarism. Shi [3] highlights that such a basic academic literacy skill as paraphrasing is in fact complex and to a large extent depends on students’ knowledge of the content of the source text, the established norms of citation practices in the discipline and the rhetorical purposes of using citations in specific contexts.

Paraphrasing is particularly important when writing academic works in the second language (L2) as the lack of language proficiency may result in excessive borrowing. Many authors have contributed to this field. Hirvela and Du [4] explored the paraphrasing strategies used by Chinese undergraduate ESL students. Keck [5; 6] compared the ways in which L1 and L2 writers treat paraphrasing. Shi [3] analyzed paraphrases by L2 students from China, Japan and Korea and suggested the significance of both linguistic and content knowledge in rewriting original texts. Unfortunately, little is known about the paraphrasing techniques employed by Russian writers. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap as it could expand the views of the scientific community on L2 academic writing as a whole. We explore the main strategies of rewriting a source text used by Russian novice academic writers and identify problematic areas in their paraphrases. We seek to inform writing teachers of the most common strategies and difficulties arising in paraphrases so that they could advise L2 students accordingly.