G3 EFL CLASS - Paraphrasing 

I was moving around and supporting my students in their thinking.

Every unit our students have to do a lot of research for their projects. Today we practiced paraphrasing during our EFL class. 

Often the students are asked to paraphrase a paragraph. I noticed that it is almost always challenging for the EAL students.

To scaffold the task in the most effective way, I decided to focus on a sentence at a time.
I discussed our learning intention and success criteria for the class. We also discussed plagiarism and the consequences of it.

My students worked in four small groups.To differentiate the task I made sure that multiple copies of the non-fiction books were available in different reading levels appropriate for my students.

First, I modeled the activity for my students. I drew a T-chart and copied a sentence from the book with a fact that we were interested in. Next, we discussed the options for the words we decided to paraphrase. I crossed out the word in focus and wrote the synonym above. After we changed about 3 words in a sentence, my students read it and copied the new paraphrased sentence in the second column of the T-chart. 

Shintaro successfully completed the task without teacher's support.

After doing it together, I thought my students were ready to paraphrase independently. When somebody had a problem with finding a synonym, students discussed the options with various members of our EAL team. That is how the activity became collaborative in nature and the students enjoyed sharing their thinking and knowledge with each other.