The Impact of AI Paraphrasing Tools on the Paraphrasing Skills of Filipino ESL Students

In this age of AI-assisted teaching and learning, there seems to be an overdependence on artificial intelligence among ESL learners, not only in accomplishing routine writing assignments, but even in writing academic papers such as thesis and dissertation. This in-depth qualitative inquiry into the challenges encountered by ESL Filipino students in paraphrasing academic texts is part of a descriptive qualitative linguistic analysis of student-generated paraphrased academic texts and paraphrasing strategies, which revealed that participants resort to synonymous substitutions, with no significant change in the structural features of the original, leading to paraphrasing errors involving partial to total semantic loss. Results show that the failure to paraphrase effectively is consistent across all levels, namely senior high school, college, and graduate students. To probe into the challenges and difficulties experienced by the study participants, a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) was conducted. Three major themes emerged from the FGD: (1) The Challenge of Preserving Semantic Content and Fidelity; (2) The Best Words in the Best Order: Grappling with the Lexico-semantic and Morphosyntactic Demands of Paraphrasing; (3) Contending with Limited Vocabulary, Poor Comprehension and Lack of Practice Due to Overdependence on AI Paraphrasing Tools. A pedagogical paradigm was designed based on the major findings of the study for a sustainable instructional intervention.