Chinese graduate students paraphrasing in English and Chinese contexts

Paraphrasing is based on one's comprehension and interpretation of the source text (e.g., Yamada, 2003). It is not clear, however, how English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) students paraphrase to project their individual views in their research papers when writing in English or their home language. This study compares the Chinese and English paraphrasing of 17 graduate students who speak Chinese as their first language. The participants (12 from a Chinese university and 5 from a North American university) identified 117 paraphrases (66 Chinese and 51 English) from their research papers and explained how they paraphrased each example. The Chinese paraphrases were found to contain significantly more textual borrowing from the matching source text than the English paraphrases. The former were not all acknowledged but the latter were. There were also a total of 80 mentions of content recontextualization (55 Chinese and 25 English). These mentions featured selecting information in the English paraphrases (24, 96%), compared with using the citer's own interpretations (17, 31%) and additional ideas (22, 40%) in the Chinese paraphrases. Implications of these cross-cultural differences are discussed.