Paraphrasing - its uses & effects

Another topic I am very interested in is paraphrasing. I find it interesting from two quite different angles:

1. Its prevalence as a writing strategy in higher education;
2. Its relation to the progymnasmata which was a key element of the ancient language & literacy curriculum.

To hint at what I am meditating on...

Paraphrasing is now glossed as translating the meanings in a text into 'your own words' to avoid plagiarism and to show you understand.

However, in the old rhetorical curriculum, paraphrasing was a controlled strategy of 'invention' for extending, elaborating, and 'turning' statements so that they become 'apt' for a new situation.

Here is a nice quote pointing to how fundamental paraphrasing was to the traditional curriculum.

"In a sense, then, the progymnasmata could be subsumed under the genus paraphrase, since they all involved the stylistic elaboration of a predetermined subject." (Roberts, 23; cited by Lanham 106; in Murphy, 2001 - Short History of Writing Instruction).

Now, there is one further thought which needs following up here: what is the relationship between imitatio/mimesis/apprenticeship as a curriculum goal and paraphrasing? The first leans towards inculcation of a subject-position and discourse; the latter towards critico-strategic reflective redeployment.
(I'm revisiting these issues because Amanda raised this issue about my proposals for reframing the curriculum as a textual commons.
She suggested that I was undervaluing the primary task of 'initiating students into the disciplinary discourse' —an objection I take very seriously).

Preview of areas of interest

The glitch in changing over from the earlier version of Blogger to the new version seems to have sorted itself out. Thank goodness.

I will try to blog something more substantive on language matters tomorrow.

Perhaps I could say for now—just to foreshadow the sorts of things I will be blogging about—that there are four main applied linguistic research programs that I am interested in plundering for ideas about language pedagogy:

1. SFL (systemic functional linguistics) - of which i have been a fellow traveller for decades
2. Paul Nation et el's AWL (Academic Word List) push - using frequency lists to rationalized vocab learning
3. Doub Biber's corpus based approach to grammar, esp academic grammar
4. And generally the whole new concept of what text and grammar are that is thrown up by taking corpus linguistics seriously a la John Sinclair.

Perhaps there are others I should be also following and exploring.
Any suggestions?

Technology woes ...

This blog insists on opening in the old format - on the last posting of last year- even though I have switched it over to the new Googlized Blogger. — my fault for not following procedures properly.

Sometime I will sort it out hopefully.

Today's thought:
What if we took seriously Gadamer's notion that translation is the paradigm of understanding, not a marginal or extreme version of understanding. And what if we took this pedagogically, not just philosophically. In other words, what if we took seriously that academic learning is always a 'contact zone' between different languages, registers, domains of life, ... ?

We would then design assessment tasks that ask for translation into other languages, idioms, registers, media. Instead of just working with a blunt opposition between 'the language of the discipline and its exponents' (our langauge) and the 'own words' of the student, an opposition that is paralysing for many students.

I believe these would be much more fruitful tasks for fostering understanding, and even for assessing understanding. They would also be much more manageable and rationally achievable tasks for students. And interesting, challenging, useful, and relevant, ....

What do you think?

New start

When I was 'rabbiting on' late last year about what Douglas Biber was discovering about academic English from corpus research, Robert Walker shot back with: 'And are you going to write an executive summary of that?' Cheeky, I thought ...

But ever since it has haunted me. Standard guilt trip ...

So here's the upshot: Yes, I am going to try to summarise/etc what I read in future on academic language -

• for my own purposes (I'm a slack skim reader)
• and also for others (who have less time to keep up their reading).

So, after a long, long hiatus ... second time lucky.