Studies have shown that academic writing plays its significant role in enhancing students’ writing when learning English as a foreign language. In particular, paraphrasing as a writing strategy of putting ideas generated in a particular passage in different ways without changing the meaning of the original source, has been addressed as a crucial tool in academia at tertiary education through which individual students integrate source texts into their own writing. In order to succeed in academic writing in English, students are encouraged to understand how to generate or restate the main points from a particular text passage while preserving the essential meanings of the source. However, the question how paraphrasing influences students’ academic writing at a university in the Mekong Delta remains unanswered. This paper therefore reports the effects of paraphrasing on English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ academic writing performance. Using a quasi-experimental mixed-methods design, pretests and posttests were conducted with one hundred and forty-three students majoring in English at a Vietnamese university. The findings indicate that paraphrasing had positive effects on students’ academic writing performance. Pedagogical implications for teachers and students are provided.

Keywords: academic writing, citation, source text, paraphrasing, plagiarism