The Effect of the Paraphrasing Strategy Instruction on Students’ Reading Comprehension Skills

Abstract

The study was conducted at the Department of Foreign Languages Education, Abant Izzet Baysal University, Turkey. The participants were 62 first-year students. The experimental and the control groups both consisted of 31 students. In the first phase, a Reading Comprehension Test, a Vocabulary Test, a Grammar Test and a Paraphrasing Test were administered to the groups to determine the equivalence. The instruction was implemented for 6 weeks. In the last phase, both groups took the Paraphrasing Test and the Reading Comprehension Test as post-tests as well as the Specific Paraphrasing Test. According to the results, the experimental group learned how to use the strategy and outperformed the control group on the Specific Paraphrasing Test. Yet, there was no significant difference between the groups with respect to reading comprehension skills.

Keywords

• Paraphrasing strategy
• reading comprehension
• instruction
• English language teaching (ELT)