Investigating Reliability of Re-modified Scoring Rubrics for EFL Paraphrasing Task

Abstract

Paraphrasing is one of crucial writing skills not only for native writing but also for L2 writing. Therefore, it gains importance as a source of a writing performance test in EFL writing. However, the types of scoring rubrics for paraphrasing tasks used in previous studies highly vary indicating using their own developed scales. This implies that there is a research gap that defining reliable scoring rubrics for paraphrasing task is necessary. Thus, this current study would like to shed light on investigating reliability of the remodified scoring scales for the EFL paraphrasing data collected by 20 participants in the proficiency of advanced and intermediate group. Furthermore, as syntactic and word change are some of the key elements considered in paraphrasing, syntactic and lexical complexity of the data were also measured using programs, LCA and L2SCA (Ai & Lu, 2010). The results turned out that there is significant correlation and reliability of the scoring rubrics which are redesigned for this study, but no meaningful conclusions in terms of syntactic and lexical complexity following the results of previous studies (Engber, 1995; Linnarud, 1986 and Lu, 2015)