Viviana and her first grade students listen to a read-aloud of "How to Lose All Your Friends."
Peers work together on a variety of ways of listening and responding to a partner as they talk about a focus question or a text model provided by the teacher. The teacher encourages sharing out the paraphrasing efforts.
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What is it?
Paraphrasing is an oral language support strategy that allows students to listen carefully to a peer and through oral interaction restate in their own words what the partner said. It increases student listening and speaking abilities plus shares language in a unique way, by putting another student’s language in the partner’s mouth using minor wording changes. There is a heightened awareness of language structure, vocabulary and ways of responding through the modeling of a peer.
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How it works
After the teacher asks a question, or presents a sentence, or short piece of text as a model, students take a few minutes to attempt to restate peer responses or they restate the shared model. At the basic level, students can simply restate what they heard or the model the teacher provided with one or two word changes using synonyms.
Students are expected to share with the rest of the group what they paraphrased or what their partner said. The sharing of a variety of restatements is key to facilitating listening in the classroom and develops more focused responding by all students. The restatement of both peer language and short text models from the teacher deepens understanding of vocabulary and content. The use of appropriate synonyms and phrase units are a large part of demonstrating understanding in social conversation as well as in content discussions.
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Why it works
When classroom participation structures are used, they foster oral language development with peer talk. The Paraphrasing participation structure gives students opportunities to listen more carefully, and examine the vocabulary, phrasing and language structure of peers, the teacher, and text models. This listening to other language forms is a scaffold for peers to examine their own language and adjust to a range of academic language models. It also provides a degree of classroom management, but the key goal is oral language development with peer-supported listening and speaking.
When this structure is used, almost all students have an opportunity to share a range of vocabulary, phrasing, and language structure. It not only helps students move out from a receptive mode, but also helps support how to listen and what to listen for in a conversation or other forms of interaction in the classroom. Sharing out a range of responses scaffolds students’ academic vocabulary, including familiar synonyms, phrases and ways of stating ideas. It provides low-risk talk at a peer level. By listening to each other’s paraphrasing, students greatly expand their listening skills and often incorporate a more academic speech register.
Sample of Paraphrase in the classroom
In this short example, a teacher models paraphrasing as she restates the answers from students.
This clip outtake is taken from a full paraphrase example: "Cranky. Look at her face: she looks... what?" Find the complete clip and more in the video library below, or open the Paraphrase sidebar in All Video Clips to the right.
Paraphrase Video Library
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Emily provides her second grade students with alternative vocabulary (familiar to them) to clarify unknown words.
Considerations for Use
Several classroom routines need to be set in place to facilitate the use of the Paraphrasing strategy:
- Decide on which children would pair effectively and assign partners. Students can come to the whole or small group experience with their pre-selected partner. In this strategy, it is helpful to match students by both talk alike abilities and at times consider content or vocabulary knowledge.
- Set up a signal for the timing of the response.
- Rehearse how to substitute synonyms and phrase units in another person’s speech or a text model as a form of restatement.
- Observe the pairs, and listen for what they are saying and how they restate words or phrases.
- Sharing out after the partner work is essential to model both listening and discussion techniques and encourage focused responding.
- When an original text model was used, return to it and show how the vocabulary, phrasing and language structure changed.
- Be willing to change partners based on observations as well as normal events such as the absence of one member of a pair. Another reason to change partners would be that one partner overwhelms a peer.
Things To Keep In Mind
This participation structure is more difficult to establish but is key for use in the full range of settings in classroom instruction in all content areas. The Paraphrasing provides for focused listening and restatement of ideas through social speech of peers and should become part of the regular classroom procedures.
Observing during the times students are engaged in both the paraphrasing and discussion in the peer talk is an excellent opportunity to notice which students are talking, how the pair is working, and quickly assess the learning. This structure usually requires more modeling by the teacher and incremental work in substituting synonyms, phrases, and then analyzing use of structure once the technique is well incorporated into the students' habits of mind.
Questions to Consider
