Developing Paraphrasing Skills through a Grammatical Metaphor Technique

Abstract

The present study examined the extent to which a key linguistic resource of grammatical metaphor (GM) drawn from SFL (Systemic Functional Linguistics) could influence Korean EFL university students’ paraphrasing. After five weeks of nominalization-based paraphrasing practice (i.e., ‘the process of making nouns’) in a reading class, all the attempted paraphrases from the pre- and post-writing were analyzed. The findings revealed that although the amount of ‘near copy’ was reduced, the participants’ paraphrases remained minimal revisions. In addition, their performance showed failures of proper vocabulary replacement with minor grammatical modifications. The analyses of grammatical metaphors revealed that ‘process as noun’ in experiential metaphors as well as logical metaphors facilitated their paraphrasing process. Finally, the survey analyses showed that nominalization helped to condense important content into a simple noun; however, they expressed mixed perceptions about the issue of deleting some parts. This study may shed light on both L2 paraphrasing and GM research.