A Semantic Analysis of the Entailment on the EFL Students’ Paraphrased Texts: A Content Analysis

Analysis on the students’ paraphrased text using its semantic relations helps to provide information on their problem or competence in paraphrasing. This study analyzed the entailment on students’ paraphrased texts to gain information on their difficulties. Content analysis method was chosen in investigating and interpreting the data based on the context. This study reveals the 3 types of entailment in students’ paraphrased texts. The lack of entailment in the students’ paraphrased texts and the absence of negative entailment indicate the students are insufficient in several competences to paraphrase (reading, vocabulary, grammar) and incapable to create the negative sentence. Using Five-Dimensional Paraphrasing Score, the average score are 2.19 in the content aspect, 2.78 in paraphrase quantity, 2.57 in paraphrase quality, 2.31 in language use, and 2.23 in overall quality which implies that they have difficulties in the meaning aspect (content) and the structure of the sentence (language use). This finding shows that the use of semantic or linguistic analysis is going to be beneficial for EFL teaching and learning process in evaluating students’ competence or difficulties.