UNIVERSITI PUTRA MALAYSIA Proceedings of the 7th Malaysia International Conference on Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 2012 www.fbmk.upm.edu.my/micollac/proceedings 1 EFFECTS ON PARAPHRASING SKILLS WHEN STUDENTS USECULTURALLY AND CONTEXTUALLY FAMILIAR TEXT 1, *Lee Mun Yee, 2 Choy Siew Chee and 3 Daljeet Singh Sedhu, Tunku Abdul Rahman College 1 leemy@mail.tarc.edu.my, 2 choysc@mail.tarc.edu.my, 3 daljeetsingh@mail.tarc.edu.my *Corresponding author ___________________________________________________________________________ Introduction For most bilingual students translation from mother tongue to the second language, especially when this language is the medium of instruction in their classroom, may be challenging. This difficulty was highlighted by Orellana and Reynolds (2008) in their research article on the influence of cultural context on paraphrasing tasks of bilingual students. This was also highlighted in research by Lee and Choy (2010) which showed that students did not seem to be helped by just paraphrasing skills alone. There could be other factors that could be influencing their ability to improve in their competency to summarise a passage which could be cultural in nature. These factors could be both cultural as well as language bound as suggested by Yu (2008) who found that students did better at summaries when they were allowed to summarise in Chinese what they had read in English. This finding would imply that students’ skill could exceed what they express in their summaries as they were hindered by their command of the second language. The results found by Yu (2008) and Orellana and Reynolds (2008) would suggest that the contextual and cultural setting of the summary passages could play a part in students’ performances. Johns (1988) suggests that summary writing skill is context driven and should be viewed as a process driven task as opposed to a skills driven task. As such, readers should orientate themselves to the content and structure of the passage. They can also summarise best when they have past experience of what is narrated in the text (Johns, 1988). This would imply thatpassagescontextually bound to students’ cultural, national and ethnic identities could help them derive more meaning from the text as opposed to one that is not contextually bound. Therefore, students’ orientation to and processing of the task may cause them difficulty in formulating ideas and strategies, resulting in a failure to complete it. Influence of Cultural Identities and context on Student’s paraphrasing skills The influence of cultural identities on a reader’s comprehension of a passage was supported by Westin (2006) who noted that passages dealing with materials that were in some way bound to the reader were more comprehensible. Further to this, it was found that non-native speakers of a