Is there a Relationship between all Types of Strategies in Paraphrasing in Academic Writing?

Many see academic writing as tedious because it involves more than just writing skills. Although it is true that academic writing is a taught course for students in higher institutions of learning, the switch from narrative or reading-for-pleasure type of writing to academic writing is not an easy task. One academic writing skill many find exhausting is paraphrasing. Is paraphrasing a writing or reading task? I think by definition of the processes involved, paraphrasing involves both reading and writing; perhaps even read-to-write. The use of paraphrasing strategies has been taught as part of academic writing skills. Paraphrasing strategies include syntactic, semantic and organization paraphrasing are generally taught to academic writers. This study is done to explore perception of learners on their use of paraphrasing strategies. This quantitative study is done to investigate learners use of paraphrasing strategies in academic writing. A purposive sample of 30 participants who attended an academic writing course and were taught the three types of paraphrasing strategies mainly syntactic, semantic and organization paraphrasing strategies. The instrument used is a 5 Likert-scale survey. The scales (table 1) used are never, rarely, sometimes, very often and always. The survey has 4 sections. Section A has items on demographic profile. Section B has 9 items on syntactic paraphrase. Section C has 4 items on semantic paraphrase and section D has 14 items on organization paraphrase. This study revealed interesting writers’ perception on the use of paraphrasing strategies. Respondents reported some strategies were used more often than others. Results of this study bear interesting implication on how teachers could better teach paraphrasing strategies to improve academic writers read-to-write techniques.