Abstract
While the typology of paraphrasing revolves around linguistic changes of paraphrasing, little is known about the importance of different types of linguistic changes and their relationship between paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency. Empirical enquiry has focused on L2 writers’ inappropriate paraphrasing performance against the norm of L1 writer, which is problematic in that L2 and L1 writers displayed considerable variation in paraphrasing. The present study drew upon 202 Chinese EFL writers’ written responses in a paraphrasing test to look into the discrete linguistic transformations in paraphrasing and examine how the frequency of different linguistic changes in paraphrasing relates to their paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency. Correlation analysis was run to analyze the relationship between the frequency of linguistic changes and paraphrasing performance. Multivariate analysis of variance analysis was conducted to examine how the frequency of linguistic changes relates to L2 proficiency. The findings revealed that Conceptual Transformation had the highest significant correlation with paraphrasing scores, followed by Lexical Transformation and then Syntactic Transformation. The frequency of Synonym Substitution, Morphology, Multiple Word Units, Phrase/Clause Shift, Active/Passive Shift and Conceptual Transformation increased as L2 writers’ proficiency levels increased. Implications are drawn from the findings for paraphrasing instruction and assessment, research in paraphrasing and L2 writers’ academic writing practice.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2021-0014).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Deaf signing diversity and signed language translations
- ‘Smelling’ diasporic: bargaining interactions and the problem of politeness
- Discursive strategies of self-promotion by doctors in online medical consultations in China: an e-commercialised practice
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- Development and validation of the questionnaire on EFL students’ perceptions of authorial stance in academic writing
- Emergent LOTE motivation? The L3 motivational dynamics of Japanese-major university students in China
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- Medical students’ attention in EFL class: roles of academic expectation stress and quality of sleep
- Foreign language peace of mind: a positive emotion drawn from the Chinese EFL learning context
- Mutual intelligibility of a Kurmanji and a Zazaki dialect spoken in the province of Elazığ, Turkey
- Investigating the relationship between linguistic changes in L2 writers’ paraphrasing, paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency