A Tutor-Led Collaborative Modelling Approach to Teaching Paraphrasing to International Graduate Students

Language learners are at particular risk of being accused of plagiarism, and this is often due to incorrect paraphrasing and quoting practices. Tertiary institutions tend to provide rudimentary citation resources through their academic integrity initiatives. Handouts, webinars and one-hour workshops may be enough for undergraduate writers who receive more elaborate instruction and practice opportunities in their classes, but for international graduate students with little to no instruction on source use in their undergraduate degrees, these resources are not enough. These writers often need more conceptual and procedural clarity to paraphrase and use sourced information correctly in their writing. This article introduces a student-centred, collaborative modelling approach and a 5-step procedure for teaching paraphrasing to multilingual graduate students in one-to-one writing center tutoring sessions.


Introduction
Meeting with a writing tutor to learn the university's standard citation and source use conventions, i.e. citation, quotation, and paraphrase, is a standard, mandatory post-discipline condition at this institution, and many of the students who underwent the disciplinary process for plagiarism were required to meet with a writing tutor for one or two sessions of source use tutoring. However, in the case of the multilingual graduate students, the EAL specialist instructor identified a need for a more systematic, hands-on approach that involved a needs assessment, explicit instruction over a period of several sessions and formative assessments for learning. This led to the development of a module on textual borrowing terms and concepts, and a module focused on the paraphrasing process, which take approximately 6 hours to complete. In addition to these one-to-one sessions, students are expected to complete one paraphrasing activity at home, an in-session independent paraphrase, and a 250-word reflection, which can be completed after the sessions. If students continue to need supports beyond the six sessions, they are encouraged to continue meeting with the tutor but are not required to do so. The tutor reports that the student has completed the educational component of their post-discipline condition but does not provide any summative reports to the disciplinary committee. The following is a brief description of the academic integrity sessions, followed by a more focused discussion of the paraphrasing process sessions.

The Sessions
In the needs assessment or diagnostic session, the tutor assesses the students' writing to understand how they use sources and identify the students' particular knowledge gaps or misconceptions related to using sources. Following this assessment, students complete either both modules (terms and paraphrasing) or just the paraphrasing module. If the tutor determines that the student can correctly use in-text citations and create an appropriate reference list, the sessions begin at the paraphrasing module. However, if the students' writing shows a lack or misuse of in-text citations or references, the workshop begins with the terms module. This module introduces students to basic concepts such as in-text citations, reference list citations, paraphrasing, quoting, and summarizing, to name a few.
Students who need to start with the terms module begin by reading a short guide to using sources outside of the session. In the following session, they take a short, multiple-choice quiz that evaluates their understanding of the terms and concepts discussed in the guide. The guide, about 20 pages long,

Implementation Challenges
The main challenge to teaching paraphrasing while considering language learners' needs is that this requires a certain depth and range of expertise (Lawrick, 2016;Thonus, 1993Thonus, , 2004Blau and Hall, 2002;Harris & Silva, 1993) on the part of the tutor. Tutors need to provide individualized feedback and assess the students' citation knowledge, writing ability and language needs. Some students may have misconceptions about using sources, and the tutor will have to address these in a culturally sensitive way. Tutors also need to be familiar with various subject-area citation styles and will need to be able to explain grammatical structures and lexical points. Tutor training would therefore need to include a module on working with multilingual learners, content knowledge related to source use and citation, and possibly an introduction to sentence structure and grammar for academic writing.
In addition, teaching paraphrasing in this way requires several regularly scheduled sessions with the same tutor. The tutor does need to prepare for these sessions, which requires a substantial amount of time and resources that may not always be readily available (Moussu, 2013;Lawrick, 2016). Also, while the pedagogy is quite feasible in larger classes or groups as demonstrated by Wette (2015), the personalized feedback and support needed to facilitate meaningful academic literacy, individual language development and writerly growth may be compromised when teaching and giving feedback to a class or a small group.
In the present context, the university's Academic Integrity Coordinator was responsible for the referrals to the EAL specialist, and monitoring the students' progress and completion of the sessions.
Although students did express that they were happy to have access to these sessions, the Academic Integrity Coordinator's involvement, and the fact that these one-to-one sessions were required to complete the Faculty of Graduate Studies post-discipline conditions, most likely facilitated attendance and completion of the modules. Despite these challenges, however, with proper training and resources, this approach to teaching paraphrasing fits the needs of the students and is feasible in the writing centre context. this paper ensures that students have many opportunities to achieve a clear understanding of basic source use concepts and facilitates the meaningful embedding of writing from sources into their existing academic literacy schemas in a low stakes learning environment, In most situations students are expected to merely read the text and use "their own words" to produce a paraphrase, In this approach, the paraphrasing process is scaffolded and the necessary language supports are in place to help the student experience the "leap of faith" that is often necessary when moving from the phrase to the paraphrase. Furthermore, having to work through an actual paraphrase gives students a realistic awareness of the type of language, effort and time they need to invest when writing from sources, which helps them plan their time more effectively. Through this comprehensive approach to teaching paraphrasing, students learn how to read complex text carefully to comprehend it fully and to identify the information they need to support their own arguments and effectively integrate this information into their paragraphs. By emphasizing the meaningful use of sources and the utility of the paraphrase in achieving this goal, this approach moves multilingual students closer to contributing their own voices to a particular field of inquiry.
Multilingual graduate students' adjustment to western writing norms requires more than a onesize-fits-all, superficial approach to introducing them to source use and Western citation. Source integration is difficult and can be overwhelming for second language writers. Providing equal access to "one size fits all" resources is not equitable and does not promote internationalization nor inclusion.
Providing academic literacy supports that take into consideration the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of graduate, multilingual students is the only way for post-secondary institutions to sustain their own pedagogical and professional integrity.