Paraphrase practice 1 (History)

The original exercise is taken form Salim Razi’s book “Advanced Reading and Writing Skills in ELT” (Razi, S. (2011). Advanced Reading and Writing Skills in ELT. APA Style Handbook, Ankara: Nobel, p. 181-183.) and it was designed for students in an English Language Teaching programme. The exercise is provided as an example and the given original text can and should easily be replaced with a text which fits into the context of your subject matter. In this case we chose an example from history.

The exercise is intended to be used to support students in developing good paraphrasing skills. It addresses also typical errors which are in the grey area between bad paraphrasing and plagiarism such as unsuccessful paraphrases, bogus phrases, find & replace or remix errors, and patchwriting plagiarism.

The main idea of the exercise is to guide the student step by step from reading a paragraph to writing a paraphrase in own words. Directing questions assist this process.

The exercise can be used in any context of teaching students to work with secondary literature and work with it properly. Poor academic writing skills may cause plagiarism and this exercise helps to foster the prevention of plagiarism in a positive way by practising in-text citations skills although the term plagiarism isn’t even mentioned.