teaching paraphrasing and summarizing

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Teaching Students to Paraphrase

Ideas for scaffolding paraphrasing so that students correctly learn this valuable but difficult-to-master skill.

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When discussing text in the classroom, it’s tough for students to shift from utilizing an author’s words (copying) to accepting the challenge to express that author’s idea in their own words (paraphrasing).

But teaching effective paraphrasing is necessary because the use of paraphrasing facilitates important literacy skills : It encourages repeated reading, develops note-taking habits as students track quotes and outline text details, and expands vocabulary as they consider appropriate ways to describe the original text. The skill may seem daunting to students because it takes time to find the appropriate words to reshape a sentence, but that is time well spent.

We also need to teach paraphrasing, of course, so that students develop the skill set required to avoid committing plagiarism unintentionally .

Student Tools

One way to support students is to make them aware of tools that may help when they’re paraphrasing. Think of these as training wheels—students won’t use them forever.

Academic Phrasebank : Ready-made phrases help students organize their sentences when they paraphrase. The site provides sentence starters for defining ideas, comparing and contrasting ideas, describing cause and effect, and explaining evidence to support statements.

For instance, if a student were paraphrasing vocabulary word X, they would be able to find sentence starters such as “The word X encompasses...,” “The word X is challenging to define because...,” and “The word X is intended to....”

Ashford University Writing Center : This website has a five-item quiz to review the paraphrasing process. It allows students to identify examples and non-examples of paraphrasing for a given text.

When examining non-examples, students are shown how replacing or rearranging words is akin to copying and pasting on a computer. Students see examples of effective paraphrasing, including a change of sentence structure or personal elaboration combined with limited quoted information.

Tone Analyzer : This tool allows students to enter a brief sample from a text and receive an analysis of the tone. When using this tool, students can request an assessment of whether the text illustrates anger, joy, sadness, etc. In addition to these emotions, the website includes language descriptors such as confident (used to describe texts that use active voice and/or words such as will , must , etc.) or tentative (texts with words such as seems , appears , might , etc.). This tool is useful in helping students successfully align the tone of their paraphrased material with the tone of the original text.

Student Self-Check Prompts

Students should outgrow the tools above, and teachers can encourage that growth by showing them how to monitor their own progress with paraphrasing. Students can self-check to determine how on track with paraphrasing they are by asking themselves these questions:

Student Cautions

Because the journey to paraphrasing may involve a few hiccups, it’s a good idea to identify potential student challenges. When paraphrasing, remind students that they should:

Teachers can push students to move beyond copying by encouraging them to see paraphrasing as the go-to reading response. When we equip students with needed resources, we make student voice the rule instead of the exception.

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Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting

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Time Estimate

Activate students’ schemata regarding the similarities and differences among summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting.

Chalkboard/whiteboard

Computer Lab Option Materials

Digital projector

Write the words Summarizing , Paraphrasing and Quoting along the top of the whiteboard.

Elicit from students the rules they know related to each writing strategy.

Add additional information as needed. The board may appear as follows:

Computer Lab Option

Rather than using the whiteboard, one may choose to open up and project the above table in a word processing program, like Microsoft Word, completing the table as answers are elicited from students.

I Used My Own Words! Paraphrasing Informational Texts

• Resources & Preparation
• Instructional Plan
• Related Resources

Paraphrasing helps students make connections with prior knowledge, demonstrate comprehension, and remember what they have read. Through careful explanation and thorough modeling by the teacher in this lesson, students learn to use paraphrasing to monitor their comprehension and acquire new information. They also realize that if they cannot paraphrase after reading, they need to go back and reread to clarify information. In pairs, students engage in guided practice so that they can learn to use the strategy independently. Students will need prompting and encouragement to use this strategy after the initial instruction is completed. The lesson can be extended to help students prepare to write reports about particular topics.

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From Theory to Practice

• Paraphrasing helps readers monitor their comprehension.  
• Paraphrasing encourages readers to make connections with prior knowledge.  
• Paraphrasing helps readers remember what they have read.
• In effective strategy instruction, the teacher explains the purpose of the strategy, how to use it, and when and where to use it  
• In effective strategy instruction, the teacher models strategy use for students and provides guided practice before expecting students to use the strategy independently.

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
• 3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).

Materials and Technology

• Computers with Internet access  
• Whiteboard (or overhead) for projection of text and shared writing  
• Print or digital texts on instructional levels of students in the class  
• Individual copies of texts (if computers are not available)

Preparation

Student objectives.

Students will

• Demonstrate comprehension by paraphrasing facts from informational texts  
• Gain knowledge and apply what they have learned about paraphrasing by reading information about three unusual animals

Session 1: Introduction of Paraphrasing

Session 2: review and guided practice with paraphrasing, session 3: review and guided practice with paraphrasing, session 4: review and independent practice with paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing is a good way to prepare students to write written reports. When students put information into their own words, they are not copying directly from a text. After the previous four sessions, a possible extension would be to identify another topic (such as countries, planets, plants), have students brainstorm what kind of questions would be interesting to answer about these, assign print materials or websites for students to read and paraphrase, take notes to answer the questions, and prepare written reports. These would be more formal than the quick writes that were done in the paraphrasing sessions.

Student Assessment / Reflections

• Throughout the sessions, when students are working in pairs or independently, make note of whether or not they are using their own words in paraphrasing. Be ready to intervene with additional modeling and practice if students are having difficulty paraphrasing.  
• The quick writes at the end of the sessions should be collected to see whether students are using their own words, whether they have understood the text they read, and what information they have learned about the animals. Compare the prior knowledge that you assessed at the beginning of each session with the information included in the quick writes to see what new information has been learned.

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Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting Texts

By Mary Montero

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We are SO close to being done with our nonfiction unit, and I’m looking forward to jumping back in to novel studies. My students are slowly growing to love (okay, maybe like is still a better word) informational text, and that was truly one of my main goals in all of this.

Last week, we did a brief review of the difference between summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting texts.  I should have done this a long time ago!  I often see it taught in the context of research, but when I started seeing summaries that used direct quotes or lines from the text, I knew it was time.  It’s also a huge skill for 5th graders to be able to paraphrase well, so I decided it was worth taking the time to do.   Oh, and the fact that standardized testing is coming in less than month was excellent incentive as well.

First, I used an idea that I got from Teaching in Room 6  about summarizing nonfiction texts with comic strips.  I LOVED this idea, and you should really read her original post.  She does a great job of explaining it, and her kids actually used the Comic Creator software to make really neat and authentic-looking comics!

I began by having my students select a book from our library focusing on an event in history.  They had to really focus in on one event that only spanned the course of about a day.  So, if they chose a major war, they had to pick one battle.

Then, they wrote summaries of their events.  Next, I had them transfer their summaries into comics.  They had to use text and dialogue to tell the story and include all of the information their summary had (without just rewriting, of course).

They came out so nice, and they all agreed that it was such a fun way to practice summarizing!

Update: I now have an entire post on teaching summarizing!  Click here to read more about summarizing, too.

Then, we made a foldable and anchor chart to review the differences between paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting.  Most of the students knew what quoting was but had forgotten how to do it with integrity (using quotation marks and referencing the author).

I included a definition of each then some key ideas about each.

Update: Here’s another version, and you can download the template to make your own HERE .  The notebook template is also included in this free file.

They copied the key ideas on the top flap of their foldable.  Then I created some summarizing task cards to help them see the difference between the three different types of rewriting and retelling.

I made a copy of the first card for each student and they glued it on the same page as their foldable. Under each section of the foldable, they did the task under the flap so that they could see the different between paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting using the same text.  We also underlined and color-coded their responses from the text.  This week, they are working on one card per day as part of their reading warm up.  So far, they have been incredibly effective, and I know it will make a difference in their written reading responses. It will also be great to have this under their belt for research in the future.

If you are interested in the summarizing task cards, you can buy them HERE .  They also include a digital option to use with your student devices!

Working on just one skill at a time? This summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting BUNDLE is a good starting place when working with shorter paragraphs. Each of these task card sets includes 32 high-interest nonfiction reading passages and a single prompt to summarize, paraphrase, or make a direct quote.

Have a happy week!

Mary Montero

I’m so glad you are here. I’m a current gifted and talented teacher in a small town in Colorado, and I’ve been in education since 2009. My passion (other than my family and cookies) is for making teachers’ lives easier and classrooms more engaging.

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14 Comments

I absolutely love all your products! This is such a great idea for getting students to really pick up on the differences between all three! I'm going to have to look into this for next year, but this year it may make a great RTI or reteaching lesson for some of my kiddos that still need help!

We're getting ready to use your Text Structures task cards right now to reteach text structures in small groups!

Thanks for sharing and producing such great products/ideas! Amanda My Shoe String Life

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