Teaching Paraphrasing

Waaayyy long ago when I taught seventh grade, I had a folder in my filing cabinet called "Paraphrasing". I had a few worksheets in the folder, things that I would use to try to teach paraphrasing, but my heart wasn't in it. I didn't really see the purpose.

Now, of course, I realize that teaching paraphrasing is at the heart of all learning. To paraphrase is to put someone else's ideas into your own words--which is what we do all the time when we are learning new ideas, seeing new images, gathering new experiences. When we teach students how to paraphrase, we teach them how to make information their own. Paraphrasing doesn't just live as a lesson or two in a research unit. Paraphrasing is in everything we do.

Teaching paraphrasing can be far more interesting than dusting off some worksheets! Here are some activities that help students recognize the importance of paraphrasing and learn how to do it.

Paraphrase across genres
Translating images to words (and vice versa) is a good way to help readers to think about how ideas are conveyed. For example, my youngest son and I had a great time at the National Gallery looking carefully at the images and paraphrasing what we saw. Turning a picture into a sentence encourages readers to consider words and explore relationships.

Explain the basics of paraphrasing
At the writing level, paraphrasing comes down to two processes: replacing words in the target sentence or text with synonyms, and/or changing the structure or order of ideas. (You can find more on this in my book, Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling.)

Paraphrasing skill, then, requires that students be able to replace words with synonyms. Students also need to be able to figure out how rework and rearrange sentences. This is tough! I've had students tell me, "That sentence cannot be rearranged"--when of course it can. Playing around with sentences and their arrangement can help students to improve with paraphrasing.

Show examples of paraphrasing
Showing students examples of two sentences that convey the same idea in different ways helps them to see how paraphrasing works. I like to use a card match activity in which each student has a sentence, and then they have to find the person who has the paraphrased version of their sentence. Partners then look at how the two sentences are similar and different. Which words can be replaced? Which words cannot be? For example, one student has the sentence Jane enjoys hiking through the forest on crisp autumn days while another student has the sentence During the fall, Jane likes hiking through the woods. Autumn can be replaced with fall, but the word Jane must stay as it is.

Help students to find examples of paraphrasing gone awry
We've all read examples of bad paraphrasing--a student who misinterpreted a word or misjudged an author's meaning. I like to show intentional cases of bad paraphrasing, especially examples with the copy-and-delete method. Can a reader just take out words here and there? How does the meaning change? This approach can be more fun than ordinary paraphrasing, especially if you create amusingly bad versions of your classroom rules.

Share lots of related texts
When students ride texts on similar topics, they naturally find and notice examples of paraphrasing. These natural examples help readers to build awareness of how ideas can be expressed in different ways. It can be helpful to make charts to show how important ideas are stated and restated in different ways. Intermediate students are often quick to notice how some beginner texts state ideas in simple terms, but lose some meaning in the process.

Paraphrasing and Summarizing Lessons: Available on TeachersPayTeachers

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Notes
-Text structure assessments are now available on Frolyc. These assessments are designed to be easy to publish to student iPads. I'm looking forward to paperless assessments! You can find the Grade 3 assessment here and the teaching guide here.

Three ways to improve student summaries

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of pulling out my presentation suitcases and doing a presentation about summarizing. I've been presenting on this topic for about five years now, but each time is new and interesting. There are just so many nuances to teaching summarizing, so many things to consider as I try to find that right match between reader and task.

I decided to structure the presentation in a new way this time, looking at several ways that classroom teachers can easily build summarizing skills in students. Here are three that work well for me in my classroom.

Retelling
I love retelling as an instructional strategy for any grade level. For students who seem to be having trouble remembering information from a text, retelling with a partner can be a good place to begin. I especially like having students use pictures or props to retell a text.

Don't neglect retelling nonfiction. Here are some simple directions that I give to students as they retell nonfiction.

Written paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is simply restating an author's words in a new way. This can be a difficult task for students who lack a wide bank of vocabulary words. Working with shorter pieces of text helps to build these skills a little at a time.

I like to project a page or a paragraph from a text and have students paraphrase the events or the information. This is pretty quick, and it lets us talk about the challenges that the text poses. What lists do we need to collapse? How can we find other ways to arrange the sentences? Besides helping students to improve their summarizing skills, paraphrasing parts of texts will also help students to put together text evidence to support their answers to open-ended questions.

(More specifics can be found in my paraphrasing and summarizing unit or in the book Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling)

Scaffolded summaries
A scaffolded summary is like a writing frame. The teacher provides part of the writing, and the students provide the rest. Scaffolded summaries can offer more or less support, depending on student needs. Here is a highly supportive summary that I gave to students as a first step into summarizing. Notice that I combined the summarizing task with a vocabulary task, putting a word bank at the top of the page. (The text is from the fourth grade Fluency Formula book.)

With a highly supportive scaffolded summary, it's important to keep the task from becoming just a fill in the blanks activity. Doing a choral reading of the entire summary can help kids to hear the academic language. (In my classroom, kids like alternating reading with boys reading one sentence, and girls the next. They also enjoy "reading like spies"--reading aloud as if every sentence ends in a deep, dark secret.)

Another way to make this an engaging task is to show students a summary with wrong answers filled in. Why are they wrong? What details from the text can show this?

As students become more skilled in summarizing, the frame can offer less and less support. Here is a scaffolded summary frame for students to use as they summarize chronological order nonfiction text. Notice that this frame is not text-specific, but can be used with any text that goes along with this text structure. (This frame is included in my text structure unit on chronological order. Frames like this are included in all of the other text structure units as well.)

Teaching students to summarize is hard. The most important thing to keep in mind, however, is that summarizing must be revisited again and again. It can't be a single unit that you teach once and then put aside. Instead, students need to see summarizing activities with every text. Whether you are retelling, paraphrasing parts of text, or using a scaffolded summary, ongoing activities will help your students to be successful.

Paths to Paraphrasing

Last week, as part of our nonfiction study, we looked at how to paraphrase sentences. Paraphrasing is the process of putting ideas from the text into your own words.  It's an important skill, one that is used across the content areas as students write summaries, take notes, and answer questions about text.

But teaching paraphrasing is tough! In order to paraphrase, readers need to have two basic skills:

Being able to replace words with synonyms-This means that readers need to have a wide range of vocabulary. When paraphrasing nonfiction, readers especially need to understand general academic vocabulary.

Being able to rearrange sentences-Readers need to be able to change the order of sentences and ideas.

Both of these are hard for fourth graders. Our first step is to look at how we can rearrange sentences. I showed students a sentence with an underlined prepositional phrase.

At the South Pole, no plants can grow.

We looked at how we could move the prepositional phrase around the sentence. Then we tried one that was a little longer:

The seas around Antarctica are filled with tiny plants called phytoplankton.

Of course, just moving around a prepositional phrase isn't paraphrasing. So then we looked at how we could replace words with synonyms:

The United States operates three research stations in Antarctica.

What words could we use to replace the word "operates"? Students came up with several that work--runs, keeps, has. Then we looked at what words we couldn't change in the sentence, like research stations. This phrase has a very specific meaning with no real synonyms. This also highlights the role of background knowledge in paraphrasing. When kids have well-developed knowledge about the topic, they have a better idea of what can be replaced and what needs to be kept.

Finally, kids tried to put it all together to paraphrase a few sentences. It takes some time to teach, but students respond well to the instruction. When we work on summarizing after the holiday break, our task will be much easier.

Looking for help with paraphrasing? Here are some ideas:

1. Work with students to develop their academic vocabulary. The Academic Word List by Averil Coxhead is a great resource for this.

2. Show students how to move ideas around in sentences. This could fit in during writing instruction or even handwriting time.

3. Work with sentences that relate to content. Kids need to have some background knowledge about the topic in order to paraphrase successfully. In fact, when readers are having trouble paraphrasing, that's a good indicator that comprehension just isn't happening!

Paraphrasing Powerpoint

Paraphrasing Progress

Upon our return from the break, I've been teaching paraphrasing. Of course, in fourth grade, paraphrasing has a very different meaning from what high school teachers hope to see. Not quite ready for locating and citing sources, we talk over and over about how paraphrasing means putting ideas into your own words.

Pictures were a great way for us to begin. We looked at a picture, read a sentence that described the picture, and then tried to write our own sentences to show the same idea in different words.

Students have made some great progress with choosing synonyms that closely relate to the meaning of the original text. Consider this sentence:

Dark clouds filled the sky.

As students worked with a partner to try to paraphrase the sentence, I heard some great conversations. "What's another word for dark?" one asked. "Mrs. Kissner, could we use 'de-exposed' instead of filled?" The room filled with talk about which words could be replaced, and which words needed to stay the same. One student said, "We could call them 'puffy white things in the sky', but that would just be too many words. I think we should keep the word 'clouds'."

But they are still very much clinging to the original structure of the sentences that we talk about. For example, students worked on this sentence:

In the field, the horses grew nervous and restless at the coming storm.

Of course, to a skilled adult, the phrase "in the field" is a perfect candidate for moving around. "The approaching storm made the horses in the field skittish" or something along those lines would be fine. But my fourth graders kept on wanting to begin with "In the ....", and trying to replace "field" with "meadow". Which isn't bad--I'm glad that they know what a meadow is! But understanding how to move ideas around in a sentence is really a key to strong paraphrasing, and my students just aren't there.

I thought that some cross-genre paraphrasing would help them to break free of this pattern. With new partners, students tried to paraphrase a nursery rhyme. I modeled this by showing students how to visualize what is described in the nursery rhyme, and then describe their mental images. (We used "Little Boy Blue", which worked pretty well. Narrative nursery rhymes work best for this--the ones that tell stories instead of just repeating lots of lines.) Even as students tried to move across genres, they still stuck with the structure of the original. "It's really raining, the old man was snoozing..."

So we will keep going. Reading several books on the same topic is a slow but powerful way to help students see how the same ideas are expressed in different ways. We just read three books about puffins, and are now starting several about turtles. One Tiny Turtle by Nicola Davies worked wonderfully...her text is a lovely description of a sea turtle's life, and students found it easy to paraphrase ideas from several pages.

All of this underscores the truly hard work of paraphrasing. In fourth grade, I only want my students to be able to paraphrase from one given text, and use their paraphrased ideas to answer questions. In just a few short years, however, students will be expected to:

1. Find a text
2. Read and understand the information
3. Paraphrase the text
4. Accurately cite the source
5. Interweave ideas from multiple sources to support a thesis

Wow! We have a long way to go. For now, though, we'll keep trying to find synonyms and looking for ways to rearrange ideas.

Paraphrasing

It's hard to do, it's hard to teach. But paraphrasing is so important for our young readers. When students can put ideas into their own words, they can take notes, effectively answer questions, and summarize.

Today we embarked on a study of paraphrasing, preparation for future summarizing. And it was a tough go. Paraphrasing seems concrete, but is really a very abstract concept. Think about it--when we paraphrase, we take ideas and put them into our own words. So ideas exist outside of words.

This is pretty abstract for fourth graders. (Just today, one of them asked me if The Sorcerer's Apprentice was a true story. Sigh.) They equate words with ideas--the words that are used to explain an idea ARE that idea.

The challenge for teachers, then, is to help students recognize that ideas can exist without words. So I went back to visualizing. As we read original sentences, I encouraged students to visualize what the sentence was saying. Then, I had them keep the visual image, and try to write a new sentence to describe it.

Results were mixed. For some students, this strategy worked brilliantly, and they wrote really decent paraphrased versions of the sentence. But other students struggled with the need to come up with synonyms, or the need to rearrange the order of ideas. By the end of the class, everyone at least knew that paraphrasing is putting ideas into your own words...which was a start. Tomorrow, I want to try again, with more concrete, easily visualized sentences. The next step, then, is to take paraphrasing into authentic texts.

Here's a link to a Powerpoint that I made to use with students. Lots of snow pictures from Caledonia State Park!

The Summarizing Lesson

What’s Important?

A few weeks ago, while my student teacher was teaching full time, I had the chance to teach a reading lesson in every classroom in the school. My goal was simple: I wanted to test out lessons for having students read a text and write a summary in one or two class periods.

In my classroom, I like to take a long range approach to summarizing, working on little bits here and there.

But there are times when you need a shortcut to a good summary. Maybe it’s getting close to state testing. Maybe someone you work with has commented that your students really need to work on summarizing. You need to help your students write a good summary, and fast.

My goal was to create a lesson plan that would be transferable to different classrooms, lead students to success, and highlight key points about summarizing.

I got to try it out eight times in two weeks, which was amazing. I had the chance to work with a clean slate each time—fresh students, fresh classroom. Here’s where I started, and here’s where I ended up.

Schema Discussion and Schema Map:
With the two sixth grade classes, I chose a text on a completely new topic for them. (Actually, I wrote the text—“Find Out about Fairy Shrimp”) Before students read, we discussed schema and made a sample web to show how our ideas are related in a schema. Then, students read the text, creating their own webs as they went along.

When they finished, I said, “What if there were someone who had no schema for fairy shrimp? When we write a summary, we need to think about our schema and the schema of the person who will read the summary. What information is most important?” After this, students worked with their partners to use their own webs to write their summaries.

Their summaries were not bad. But I decided that this is not a transferable lesson. I worry that, when they read about topics that are familiar, students will add details from their schema to their summaries. Plus, students might be too tempted to add the seductive details from the text at the expense of the important ideas.

So this was not the lesson. Next I moved on to fifth grade.

Summarizing with a Purpose
Something that really bothers me about summarizing is that, often, there is no reason other than “because I told you so.” I decided to go with cute with the fifth grade, telling students that they were research assistants at a nature center. They had to read an article and report on its contents to the naturalist.

The text for this was “How Do We See in the Dark?” After students read, they sorted strips of paper with ideas from the text into piles for “Important” or “Less Important”. This worked pretty well. However, translating the ideas from the “Important” pile and into a final summary proved to be difficult for students. Some of them did not realize that they needed to organize the ideas according to the order of the text. Yikes!

Finally!
When I got to fourth grade, I figured out how to do it. First, I realized that it really needed two days. A lesson to get to a good summary simply can’t happen any more quickly.
At the heart of this lesson is the idea of what is most important. To write a good summary, a reader needs to know what is most important in a text. But importance is a sliding scale. Readers often bring contextual importance to what they read. Details may be most interesting and important if they resonate with prior experiences. But for a summary, a reader needs to look to textual importance.
I realized that this lesson needed to be very explicit with helping students to find out what is important.

Modeling: First, we looked at a two-paragraph text together. We read the text aloud and decided on the topic. Then, students came to the board to move sentence strips with ideas from the text into the headings “More Important” or “Less Important”. I gave them three questions to ask of an idea:
Is it related to the topic?
Does it relate to a heading?
Does it give new information about the topic?

Writing the class summary: After we had sorted the sentence strips, I showed students how to reorganize the ideas to match the structure of the text. Then, we looked at how we could paraphrase the ideas by combining sentences to create a three-sentence summary. This was tough going for a lot of the students.

Guided practice: Next, the students read a longer text with a partner. They sorted the ideas on their own. With fourth graders, we did need to get back together to go over the sorting to make sure that they had chosen the correct ideas. I modeled going back to the questions again and again to make sure that an idea was important. (Thanks to Colleen for showing me how structured this needed to be!)

Writing the independent summary: Once students had the important ideas, they were on their own to reorganize them, paraphrase them, and write the summary. And they weren’t bad. Finally!