Exploring The Construct Validity Of Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is of critical importance in source use practice to avoid plagiarism,while its construct remains slippery,making the relevant learning,teaching and testing practice difficult to operationalize.The present study purports to explore the construct validity of paraphrasing.A total of 226 first-year non-English-major college students were recruited to respond to a seven-item paraphrasing task.Two types of data were collected: product and process data.The product data refers to the testtakers’ written responses of paraphrasing,which were coded based on a proposed coding theme of four hypothetical variables of paraphrasing competence and rated by four holistic scales.The process data were test-takers’ think-aloud report of their thinking processes while responding to the task,as well as strategy use elicited by a paraphrasing strategy use inventory.Findings of the study are as follows: from the perspective of product,correlation and step-wise regression analyses showed that conceptual transformation has the highest predictive power of the construct of paraphrasing,followed by lexical transformation and syntactic transformation,indicating that comprehension occupies a central place in paraphrasing competence,and vocabulary and grammar are important components of the construct of paraphrasing.However,transformation extent has no predicative power,because L2 writers tend to rely heavily on verbatim source use.From the perspective of process,it is found that participants indeed employed many paraphrasing strategies.Cognitive strategies including analyzing,summarizing and translating strategies were most frequently used,followed by metacognitive strategies including evaluating and monitoring strategies.Overall,cognitive processes of comprehension,application,analysis,synthesis and evaluation in Bloom’s Taxonymy of Educational Objectives were reflected by paraphrasing.However,structural equating modeling analysis showed that all those strategies exert no significant effect on test-takers’ paraphrasing performance,which may be attributed to some factors such as the task-specificity of strategies,task familiarity and so on.