University Students’ Ability in Paraphrasing Academic Paragraph at English Education Department of Medan State University

Paraphrasing is a crucial skill required for producing proper academic writing, which is one of the essential requirements in higher education. The aim of this study was to assess the quality of academic paragraph paraphrases. A three�dimensional paraphrasing competence model by McCarthy, Guess, and McNamara (2009) was followed to assess the texts for semantic completeness, lexical difference, and syntactic difference. The study used mix method that contains inferential and descriptive data and the data were collected throughwriting task and questionnaire. The subjects were 26 English Education Department of Medan State University who have enrolled scientific writing class. Following the examinations and the analysis of students‟ perceptions regardingdifficulties in paraphrasing. the syntactic aspect emerged as the most challenging area interfering with paraphrase quality, with semantic completeness also
emerging as difficult. The study concluded with recommendations to improve instructional cycles by reinforcing reading comprehension and lexical development.