Teaching paraphrase as a communication strategy: issues and a proposal

This paper reviews the literature on practical and empirical approaches to teaching paraphrase as a co㎜unication strategy and finds that the notion of paraphrase in the studies has been very limited. It then attempts to investigate what it means to paraphrase by analyzing paraphrastic expressions used in a monolingual dictionary and a pedagogical grammar book. This analysis is hoped to yield a list of some techniques or patterns of paraphrase, both at and beyond the lexical level, which second language learners may profitably exploit to avoid and solve communication problems they encounter in speech production. The paper makes a pedagogical proposal that paraphrase exercises should be integrated into English lessons, on a regular basis, in which learners are encouraged to paraphrase every single sentence in their textbook by using some of the paraphrastic techniques identified. The plausibility of this proposal has partly been tested by an attempt to paraphrase sentences in some textbook materials.