The Quality of Students Paraphrases of an Expository Text: A Study of a Group of English Department Students.

The research aimed at obtaining the information related to students’ quality in paraphrasing an expository text seen from the four dimensions of a paraphrase evaluation. The design of the research was descriptive research. The subjects of the research were 15 students who had passed all reading and writing courses. The instrument used in the research was paraphrasing test. The components which were used as the base to evaluate students’ work were semantic completeness, lexical similarity, syntactic similarity and paraphrase quality. The students’ works were graded by scoring rubric which was divided into 4 categories; 4 meant excellent, 3 meant satisfactory, 2 meant below average and 1 meant ineffective. The research findings showed that students’ paraphrase quality was on ineffective category since almost all of the students obtained 1 on all dimensions. On semantic completeness dimension, almost all students obtained 1 which meant they were on ineffective category. On lexical completeness dimension, almost all students obtained 1 which also meant they were on ineffective category. Also, on the rest dimensions; syntactical and paraphrase quality dimensions, almost all of them obtained 1, which indicated that they were on ineffective category. It was expected that more concerns related students’ paraphrase should be given.