One Smart Way to Boost Students' Reading Skills

If you've ever asked a student to say something in their own words, you know how difficult it is for them to rephrase things. However, did you know that an inability to paraphrase also holds back their reading skills?

This is because basically all texts reword things to avoid repetition and improve flow. In fact, in this blog post so far, we’ve already referred to the same concept (paraphrasing) in five different ways!

All the different ways we paraphrased "paraphrase"!

While the connection between these phrases is clear to us, learners will likely miss some of them and struggle to understand the text. In the worst case scenario, they’ll mistakenly think the four phrases refer to completely separate concepts and get confused!

As Cambridge’s Learning Vocabulary in Another Language explains:

Learners need to be able to see the links between the various forms of topic-related vocabulary; for example, they need to see that “biologist” and “scientist” are in fact referring to the same person in a particular text. … . [Clarifying this would help] the learner quickly make sense of the text, because the sentences central to the topic would be understood.

So when we’re reading news articles or other texts with students, we should pay special attention to how they process paraphrased texts – especially those that are critical to understanding the main topic.

Let’s look at examples of paraphrase from Daily News articles that might confuse students, so we know what to be on the lookout for.

1. Articles that Use Jargon

Articles that use jargon will often cause confusion for learners, so be especially careful when reading materials that use technical vocabulary.

Let’s say you’re reading the article “German Man Fined for WWII Weapons Collection.” It starts by referring to its main subject as “an 84-year-old man” and “the man.” However, by the third paragraph, it refers to him as “the defendant.”

Here are three possible scenarios that could occur assuming your student is unfamiliar with the word “defendant”:

They’ll use context to deduce that “the defendant” refers to the 84-year-old German man.
They’ll be temporarily confused but realize that “the defendant” refers to the same man when they see the word again a few paragraphs later.
They’ll be thrown off by this paraphrase and miss the point of the piece.

How your student deals with this word will be affected by the amount of experience they have reading longer English texts and their interest in the specific piece of writing, among other factors.

Just make sure to be on the lookout whenever you see the main subject of a piece paraphrased using higher-level vocabulary. If they seem confused, check their comprehension with questions like “Do you know who ‘the defendant’ is referring to?” and “Why is the man also called a ‘defendant’?”

2. Synonyms

Even when an article doesn’t use jargon, we still want to be on the lookout for problematic rephrasing. This is because paraphrases often use words that are synonyms in English but not in our students’ native tongues.

Let’s say you’re reading the Daily News article “This Flying Car May Be in the Sky by 2022.” In the first two sentences, the subject of the piece is referred to as “flying cars,” “the cars,” and “the vehicles.”

For proficient readers of English like us, it’s easy to see that “vehicles” is being used as a synonym for “cars.” (Tellingly, many English dictionaries – including ours – mention the word “car” in their definition of the word “vehicle.”)

However, “vehicle” isn’t a synonym for “car” in other languages. For example:

The Japanese equivalent of the word “vehicle” would be “norimono,” which means “anything you can ride for transport” and usually conjures up images of large vehicles like trucks, buses, planes, and ships – not cars.
In Chinese, the literal translation of “vehicle” is “jiaotong gongju” (“transportation tool”) which vaguely refers to any means of transport.

So while a learner who has enough exposure to authentic English would understand that the word “vehicle” usually refers to road vehicles, learners with less experience could easily be thrown off (“Why is the article suddenly talking about transportation tools? Is it talking about some other means of transportation?!”).

📌 Takeaways

Every paragraph, news article, or book is a mountain that learners need to climb. Each paraphrase is a chance for them to climb upwards – or potentially lose their footing.

Our job as tutors is to make sure our students don’t “fall off the mountain.” So let’s make sure they recognize paraphrase when they see it. Happy tutoring!