Paraphrasing Strategy in EFL Ecuadorian B1 Students and Implications on Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension in Ecuadorian students has been mostly managed at a literal comprehension level, leaving out inferential and critical comprehension. This is because most of the articles students read require a high level of literacy and a good domain of comprehension strategies. One of these strategies is paraphrasing; therefore, the purpose of this research was to analyze the effects of paraphrasing and its implications on reading comprehension skills in English as a foreign language. This study was developed in B1 students enrolled at the 6th level of English at Linguistics Competence Department at Universidad Nacional de Chimborazo UNACH with a sample of 50 students. A base-line pre-test and a posttest to an experimental and control group were applied. The project implementation took ten sessions and students learned the techniques to effectively paraphrase and the pitfalls they should avoid when applying this strategy. The analysis of T-student test yielded that the experimental group outperformed the control group. The main results showed that once students learn the techniques and correctly apply them, it helped them out to go beyond the literacy level, applying an authentic reading comprehension of the text. Pedagogical implications about paraphrasing and reading comprehension are presented in the discussion.