The Effect of a Blended Approach in Enhancing Paraphrasing and Summarization Skills Among EFL Female Students in Academic Writing

In academic writing, paraphrasing and summarizing are essential skills that allow students to combine sources while upholding academic integrity. However, due to a lack of practice and feedback in conventional teaching, female students in the English department usually face difficulty with paraphrasing and summarization skills. This study demonstrates that if blended learning systematically integrated to academic writing instruction, it will lead to both significant statistical improvement in critical writing sub-skills and increase learner engagement and satisfaction. It tries to discover the effect of a computer-assisted blended learning approach integrating Moodle-based activities to ameliorate writing skills, including paraphrasing and summarization. It aims to: assess the impact of blended learning on paraphrasing and summarization skills, identify skill-specific improvements, and examine students’ satisfaction. The sample embraced 70 third-level female students in the Department of English/College of Education for Women/ University of Baghdad/Iraq. They were divided into two equal groups: the experimental exposed to blended learning for eight weeks using Moodle modules contained interactive paraphrasing tasks, summarization exercises, video tutorials, and peer feedback forums, while the control exposed to the conventional lectures. This study used a quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test design. The study implemented three instruments, firstly, pre-test and post-test for assessing paraphrasing and summarization, secondly, a scoring rubric for post-test adopted from Fremont High School (2006), thirdly, a Likert-scale questionnaire adopted from Al-Issa, H. A. (2018). The findings showed improvement in both paraphrasing and summarization. The experimental group showed their satisfaction in citing and interactive sources. It suggested using a blended approach in academic writing through Moodle