Enhancing Academic Writing Skills: Journey from Patchwriting to Synthesizing

From Patchwriting to Paraphrasing to Synthesising: A Rhetorical Journey MAGGIE HEENEY RENISON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO ONTARIO, CANADA BALEAP 2017

Overview The challenges of EAP and patchwriting The rhetorical journey The study: teacher and participants The results Final thoughts

Challenges for University EAP Learners Difficulty with paraphrasing, summarising and synthesising materials for academic papers. Difficulty with critically synthesising multiple works with their own views. Students attempt to paraphrase but the work produced has a similarity to the original text in terms of vocabulary and syntax. the original may be produced, known as PATCHWRITING (Andrade & Evans, 2013).

Why does this Happen? Students might not have the level of vocabulary to effectively summarize or paraphrase (Grabe & Zhang, 2013) Students need not only breadth but also depth of vocabulary knowledge: collocations, synonyms, word families (Hulstijn, 2001); consequently, lexical choices may be inaccurate or seem awkward. Views of ownership vary culturally The ease of hyperlinks and cutting and pasting materials may increase the chance of plagiarism (Bloch, 2008).

What Happens? Turnitin or other software identifies this as plagiarism. Academic penalties depending on the institution. Unintentional plagiarism should not be punished but should become a pedagogical focus with specific paraphrasing strategies being taught to improve language and vocabulary (Li & Casanave, 2012)

The Rhetorical Journey In order to paraphrase and synthesise readings into a new text, students are required to transform and critically assess knowledge with their own ideas. Teaching paraphrasing, and, especially, synthesis, is more than teaching the strategies but is also being sure students have conceptualised and evaluated the success of the process (Hirvela & Du, 2013). Paraphrasing is a complex reconstruction of a text, a form of composing. Synthesising reading materials requires knowledge transforming, a very challenging skill (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; Hirvela & Du, 2013).

The Rhetorical Journey The Steps Reading-to-write Mining the texts (Hirvela, 2004, 2016) Rhetorical reading strategies step beyond the text itself as students use cues in the text, and their own knowledge of discourse situations, to recreate or infer the rhetorical situation of the text (Hirvela, 2016, p. 56). Modelling teacher thinks aloud as an expert and guides the process (Cumming, 1995, Heeney, 2015) Collaboration teacher- student / student-student

The Study Investigated explicit paraphrasing training in a university credit EAP reading-to-write class and analysed the related tasks 10 weeks, 25 undergraduate students (17 Chinese, 2 Korean, 1 Russian, 1 Italian and 4 East ) Class room observations, extensive field notes of all teacher talk, 6 focal students, interviews Think-aloud protocols from the focal students after writing Interviews with teacher and focal students

The Training and the Tasks For three weeks, students received explicit strategy training in vocabulary development based on the task-related readings along with six specific paraphrasing techniques: 1. Synonyms 2. Word order 3. Using passive voice or active 4. Changing sentence structure 5. Re-ordering the sentences yet keeping meaning 6. Using different parts of speech Students had to write a 200-word paraphrase from a health- related article, a summary of 7 paragraphs from the same article, and to finally to synthesise a minimum of three paraphrases from different source texts into an essay on a similar subject.

Explicit Teacher talk and the Rhetorical Journey Sophia used a rationale of why, when, showed how to do a task so that students could conceptualise that paraphrasing is knowledge transforming process or a rhetorical journey What does synthesise mean? Group the ideas. Look for connections Every time you read, analyse each reading and then connect Think about the theme and ideas. Think about what you know already. How do we do this? Take notes on your readings to make connections and this will inform your writing.

The Teachers Rhetorical Journey To help with student understanding of how synthesis is a rhetorical journey, Sophia, the instructor, immersed the students in the current topic (e.g. GMO s or Eastern/Western medicine): Topic knowledge was developed through extra videos, newspaper articles and class discussions All grammar activities were on the theme All practices for paraphrasing were on the theme Even tests (e.g. vocabulary and grammar) used the current topic

The Importance of Vocabulary Student-generated work was used as a teaching tool to help with vocabulary development especially when using collocations. The collocations would be brand as an adjective + noun Let s write this down When I do this, I put the word brand first. When I look at this sentence on the board, I can t say loyalty of brand. Why? Well, it sounds like the brand is loyal. But what is loyal? Yeah. The consumer is loyal to the brand. That is why I have to say brand loyalty Let me think. Brand awareness! Brand identity! Look how I am building vocabulary! I need to remember these words when writing.

The Collaborative Focus on Synonyms The instructor mined the text (Hirvela, 2004) for teaching vocabulary using student texts. Let us look at some gorgeous verbs in titles .. Such as Homeopathy offers deep and true healing. Or I could say provides ? These are positive sounding verbs. Look at the essential verb for talking about health and pain relieve. How about: Chiropractors unleash the body s inherent healing ability? Be informed by your reading collect some of these verbs! let s think of immunizations augment enhance and improve the chance the not getting diseases. But can I say enrich. . No it does not seem right.

Teaching steps of paraphrasing by student examples Original text Vaccines are safe for almost everyone although very rarely there are people who experience adverse reactions Paraphrase No side effects should be experienced after vaccinations; however, exceptions are still possible Look at the original sentence and look at what your classmate wrote, and think about what steps he took to paraphrase. Yeah! He changed sentence structure. A good indicator is how he used the conjunction however. Also, he changed words...What is that called? Yes, he used synonyms. Did he change the parts of speech? Sure did! Look at that passive! Has he changed the ideas? No!

The Focal Students 6 focal students did stimulated recalls of their vocabulary use and paraphrasing techniques; plus, they evaluated the success of the paraphrase by comparing their work to the original texts Student perceptions revealed an increased awareness of patchwriting by being able to identify poorly paraphrased language. However, all the focal students commented that they felt limited by vocabulary. Often the lexical choices were not accurate synonyms for the paraphrase but were creative choices, yet meaning was discernable

What Students had to Say: Synonyms Furthermore, acupuncture is considered a effective treatment to cope with chronic diseases such as arthritis, and reflected: As I used the considered before, but I don t know the other words, so I used it again. I don t think the word cope is accurate at all, but I don t know the other words. I don t know a better synonym. So I think this okay. What about synonyms? I use the synonym respond instead of the verb occur . Allergic reactions can occur is in the text. I used small allergies responds Many patients catch a slight fever or feel aching at the injecting spot in the body

Thinking about the Paraphrasing Steps . I used the method Sophia teached us. Changing sentence structure, using synonyms - something like that. But I usually don t use the passive form of it because I get mixed up with it. I usually avoid using it. You see me using like paraphrasing with parts of speech and changing order of sentences.

Students and their Rhetorical journey Synthesizing was very helpful because it is additional material for a given topic. I can see how professionals think about the topic and then put ideas together, and that helps me write. The way she teaches more interactive, this is like a system that I like, so overall, yeah. I like interactive activities, going to the board. It is kind like brainstorming I find the main focus point I want to write about, read then write about and focus on it. And then expand a little

Students and the Rhetorical Journey Synthesing does help. You can synchronize all the ideas together. So you might get a single point out of it and put it with others kind of like brainstorming. When I write some papers in some courses, I have to I collect some informations but I can t just quote it. Paraphrase is useful at this time. Yeah useful in the future.

Student Reactions to the Training Identified synthesis as a valuable skill, yet very challenging Despite the challenge, viewed paraphrasing and synthesis as a composing process that incorporated their ideas into content from readings. Enjoyed the interactive, cooperative classroom Being in classes was great. She interest me in studying process. It wasn t just a regular studying process, it was something else. So I feel then contact between and Sophia it is not just teacher and student. It was a more personal level and it helped me learn.

Conclusion and Implications These results confirm the need for explicitly teaching paraphrasing and synthesising skills The study also concurs with Li and Casanave (2012) that explicitly teaching paraphrasing skills needs a specific focus on language and vocabulary development. Results also indicate that these sophisticated and time- consuming skills of paraphrasing and synthesis need to be explicitly taught as a rhetorical method as synthesis is driven not by the readings but by the writer s text. Teachers expert modelling of effective paraphrasing and synthesising techniques have an impact on student learning

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