Exploring Students’ Use of AI Translation and Paraphrasing Tools during Academic Reading

The increasing availability of AI translation and paraphrasing tools offers new possibilities for supporting English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ academic reading. This qualitative study explored how university students use these tools across the before-, during-, and after-reading stages and how such use facilitates comprehension and meaning-making. Data were collected through think-aloud protocols, reading journals, and semi-structured interviews and analyzed thematically. Findings reveal that students engage with AI tools in a strategic and reflective manner, employing translation for lexical support, paraphrasing for structural simplification, and both tools for reflective consolidation. Students’ use of AI was stage-specific: pre-reading translation enabled previewing and activation of prior knowledge; during reading, paraphrasing supported comprehension monitoring and verification; after reading, students consolidated understanding through summarization and clarification. The study highlights that AI tools function as both cognitive and metacognitive scaffolds, extending learners’ capacity to navigate complex academic texts while promoting learner agency and self-directed reading. These insights offer practical implications for integrating AI tools into academic literacy instruction and suggest avenues for future research on longitudinal effects, disciplinary differences, and adaptive strategies for diverse proficiency levels.