AN EXPLORATION OF PARAPHRASING STRATEGIES AND CHALLENGES IN ACADEMIC WRITING AMONG PAKISTANI POSTGRADUATE ESL STUDENTS

Abstract

Academic writing is an essential skill at the higher education level for conveying scholarly ideas. Academic writing requires critical thinking, analytical engagement, and semantic accuracy. Despite years of formal training in English language skills, postgraduate ESL students struggle with source text comprehension, effective paraphrasing, and syntactic organization. This study aims to examine the paraphrasing strategies and difficulties of postgraduate ESL students. It followed a mixed-methods sequential design, including a paraphrasing test administered to 22 postgraduate ESL students to identify the techniques, and a 10-item questionnaire designed to explore the challenges encountered by postgraduate ESL students while paraphrasing information or ideas. The analysis employed Keck’s (2006) taxonomy and was further informed by Bailey’s (2006) and Rogers’ (2007) paraphrasing frameworks. A systematic thematic analysis of the paraphrasing test revealed the employment of certain strategies, such as substitution, syntactic variation, summarization, and description. Inappropriate vocabulary usage and difficulties in understanding and paraphrasing complex sentence structures emerged as major challenges. Furthermore, the findings revealed that postgraduate ESL students performed well in implementing lexical and syntactic changes while preserving grammatical accuracy; however, they lagged in conceptual writing. Awkward sentence structures, meaning distortion, inaccuracy, omission of crucial information, and semantic inaccuracies were common problems. The study highlights the need for explicit pedagogical instruction in paraphrasing strategies, with emphasis on deeper-level structural modifications and conceptual expression.