Teaching paraphrase as a communication strategy: a critical review and a proposal

This paper investigates how paraphrase can be taught as a communication strategy (CS) to help learners to cope with problems they encounter in speech production. By critically reviewing the literature on practical and empirical approaches to teaching paraphrase, it reveals that the notion of paraphrase in those studies has been very limited. It then investigates what it means to paraphrase by analyzing paraphrastic expressions used in a Inonolingual dictionary and a pedagogical grammar book. This analysis results in a list of some patterns of paraphrase both at and beyond the lexical level which learners may profitably exploit to avoid or solve their communication problems. It finally makes a pedagogical proposal that paraphrase exercises should be integrated into English lessons on a regular basis, in which learners are encouraged to paraphrase every single sentence in the textbook they use by selecting the most appropriate pattern of paraphrase from among those identified while making most use of all the linguistic resources at their disposal.

Published with permission from the copyright holder.
This is published in Annual Review of English Language Education in Japan, 1999 Vol.10 pp.21-30
(C)1999 by Japan Society of English Language Education