As a kind of grammatical competence, it is teachable if ur students are developmentally ready to learn. it is noteworthy that your students should competence in terms of vocabulary, grammatical structure ,reading comprehension skills and writing. so, after having a pretty good repertoire of linguistic skills, it is teachable.best

Well, we can teach our students the Methods of Paraphrasing (like, change the structure, change the words, take notes and etc.).

However, the students must posses good linguistic knowledge to be able to paraphrase.

Dear Paul,

The problem of paraphrasing is part of the metalanguage of teachers to their students. In L2, paraphrasing is introduced early in the learning process by the teacher, but the students will internalize that later on owing to linguistic and cognitive reasons. Basically, paraphrasing is implemented with reading and lexis apprenticeship when students have enough grammar and vocabulary to be explain/paraphrase difficult things in class work and/or student assessment. Paraphrasing is introduced to the students receptively (through multiple choice) or productively (through making students paraphrase).

Dear Farangis, Abdullah, and Zouheir,

Thanks for your responses. To check my understanding, I hear you saying that if teachers control for sufficient underlying competence in systems like grammar and vocabulary and skills like reading and writing then we can teach the techniques. I am particularly intrigued by the notion of lexical and grammatical (?) apprenticeship in this endeavor as it seems to me that paraphrasing is very content specific. What would a lexical or grammatical apprenticeship entail?

Yes, it is teachable. It is very important to teach students paraphrasing strategies and to motivate them using such strategies in their communication. It is more important for beginners as their linguistic system is inadequate and they need for paraphrasing strategies to compensate their limited knowledge.