The University of Costa Rica seeks to prepare students for understanding academic texts in English by requiring reading comprehension courses in numerous degree programs. In this context, this paper aimed to assess the effectiveness of graphic organizers as a strategy to promote reading comprehension by focusing on the identification of rhetorical functions in argumentative texts. The paper followed an explanatory-sequential design within a mixed-methods approach with a group of 20 students at the Western Branch of UCR. To apply the strategy, three argumentative texts and their corresponding graphic organizers were used. The data consisted of performance scores and of answers to questionnaires. After the cycle of applications, the results showed a gradual improvement in the identification of rhetorical functions, particularly of arguments and counterarguments. Support for the author’s arguments, rebuttals to counterarguments, and the author’s overall claim were slightly more difficult to identify. The participants found graphic organizers helpful to better understand the parts of an argument in a text and its overall organization. At the same time, they found that the lack of explicit discourse markers and of familiarity with the content made understanding the connections between rhetorical functions difficult in spite of the help provided by the organizers. The study concluded that repeated implementation of graphic organizers has a positive impact on reading comprehension by helping students to read more strategically. However, accompanying strategies such as summarizing and discriminating main ideas from supporting details are necessary to complement the work with graphic organizers and improve their effectiveness.

The aim of this study was to assess factors affecting the quality of paraphrases written by college level EFL learners. A three-dimensional paraphrasing competence model by McCarthy, Guess, and McNamara (2009) was followed to assess the texts for seman- tic completeness, lexical difference, and syntactic difference. The selected method was a mixed method approach. The quantitative analysis was used to measure the rate of success of each paraphrasing competence whereas the qualitative analysis aimed to de- scribe the perceived difficulty of the competences and the reasons behind it. The subjects were 17 EFL students enrolled in a third year English composition course at the Univer- sity of Costa Rica. The corpus of the study consisted of 51 paraphrases. Following three rounds of examinations and the analysis of students’ perceptions, the lexical dimension emerged as the most challenging area interfering with paraphrase quality, with seman- tic completeness also emerging as difficult. Other factors affecting paraphrase quality were inappropriate use of passive voice, style and register, and inaccurate lexical substi- tutions. The study concluded with recommendations to improve instructional cycles by reinforcing reading comprehension and lexical development, and by assessing the differ- ent dimensions of paraphrasing separately.