초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Paraphrasing quality has proven to be highly associated with two major linguistic components: lexical competence and syntactic competence. Nonetheless, few attempts have been made to view the skill as a window through which learners’ interlanguage can be estimated. How learners manipulate sentence structures and vocabulary in retelling may represent their current level of language proficiency. Therefore, with an aim to verify whether paraphrasing tasks are legitimate as a writing test item to accurately identify the learners’ productive language abili- ties, a correlation study was conducted with 364 test-takers ranging from grade 7 to university freshmen. The scores the learners earned from paraphrasing tasks were compared with those obtained from self-assessments of their English abilities in the case of the secondary school students and from TOEIC in the case of the university students. Paraphrase rating scales adopted in this study were developed by school teachers, considering the range of Korean secondary students’ English proficiency. It has been revealed that paraphrasing task has the potential as a valid writing test item as proven by statistically significant correlation coefficients between two sets of scores.
