Toward a Pedagogy of Paraphrase

Abstract

Practicing paraphrase may be used in language-training courses to develop students' facility in self-expression. Paraphrasing provides for practice of known structures and vocabulary, but more importantly, it can activate structures and vocabulary which would otherwise remain in a student’s passive knowledge. This paper outlines a method and potential sources for classroom presentation, illustration, and analysis of sentences and texts which stand in paraphrase relation to each other. The advantages of such an approach are that (1) it offers students concrete and correct models as a starting point for their own attempts at self-expression; (2) it combats the tendency to use literal translation and transposed syntactic structures which violate conventional usage; (3) it follows the parameters of first language learning; (4) it reveals a language's stylistic preferences; (5) it encourages the study of language models for the specific purpose of learning and assimilating patterns of expression at a higher level than phrases and elementary syntactic structures.