Characteristics of EFL Readers' Summary Writing: A Study with Korean University Students

Abstract

This study reports part of the findings of a study of Korean EFL students' skill in summarizing an English text. The participants were 70 freshmen who were assumed to possess the typical Korean EFL students' characteristics related to summary writing. The two English texts employed were expository texts taken from a college‐level ESL reading book. One of the texts (i.e., Text A)was assumed to be easier than the other (i.e., Text B). Data gathered from two summaries were analyzed in terms of the content idea units included in the summary, the idea units on four importance levels, use of three summarization rules (i.e., deletion, selection, and transformation), and accuracy. According to the results, the participants in this study were sensitive, though not fully, to importance. The most frequently used rule was the deletion rule, and the least frequently used rule was the transformation rule. Analysis of data also revealed that text difficulty can affect the summary writer's behavior Changes in the writers' behaviors due to text difficulty were noted in the proportion of content idea units included in the summary, the use of selection and transformation rules, and in the accuracy rate, but not in the use of the deletion rule or total rule use. Results indicate that Korean EFL students do not possess effective summarization skills and are in need of appropriate instruction and practice to improve these skills.

Exploring the Relationship between Summary Writing Ability and Reading Comprehension: Toward an EFL Writing-to-Read Instruction

“…Summarizing, one of the primary writing-to-read strategies in academic settings, offers tremendous opportunities for writing to enhance reading (Kintsch & Van Dijk, 1978;Trites & McGroarty, 2005). Many investigations in L1 settings have demonstrated that summary writing improves reading comprehension of texts (Kim, 2001;Keck, 2006), L2 research has also found substantial impact of summarization on the reading comprehension of EFL learners (Baleghizadeh & Babapur, 2011;Trabasso & Bouchard, 2002;Shokrpour, Sadeghi & Seddigh, 2013). However, research has seldom been done to include summary writing as part of the instruction to ascertain whether it can actually lead to better reading comprehension in EFL settings (Huang, 2014).The current study was conducted to investigate the effects of EFL students' summary writing ability in measuring their reading comprehension.…”

The effects of a theory‐based summary writing tool on students' summary writing

“…Summary writing is denoted as the process of producing a more concise text by selecting important information and deleting other supporting and explanatory details from the source text (Abdi et al, ; Idris et al, ; Kim, ; Kirkland & Saunders, ). Summarizing skills appear to be integral in comprehending a text, hence, have been employed to evaluate students' understanding in secondary and tertiary education in most ASEAN nations (Abdi et al, ; Idris et al, ).…”

“…Although a substantial number of studies have investigated summary writing, only a handful have initiated innovative techniques that have led to summary writing enhancement (Abdi, Idris, Alguliyev, & Aliguliyev, 2016;Cho, 2012;Friend, 2001;Idris, Baba, & Abdullah, 2011;Ke & Hoey, 2014;Marzec-Stawiarska, 2016;McDonough, Crawford, & De Vleeschauwer, 2014;Sung, Liao, Chang, Chen, & Chang, 2016;Wichadee, 2014;Yang, 2015). Obviously, some students have poor summary writing skill, particularly among English as a second language (ESL) students (Hosseinpur, 2015;Idris et al, 2011;Kim, 2001;McDonough et al, 2014;Wichadee, 2014). Summary writing reflects repetition of sections from the original text with absence of comprehension.…”

Paragraph-level Errors in Chinese Undergraduate EFL Learners‘ Compositions: A Cohort Study

“…For example, Kim (2001) analyzed the errors in 60 Korean university EFL learners' summary writing and found that syntactic errors were the most damaging, followed closely by lexical errors. Cheng (1994) examined 455 errors in the English compositions produced by six first-year English majors and three second-year English majors from a Chinese university in Beijing.…”

“…Since its boom in 1970s, numerous studies have been done to describe and categorize errors at sentence, paragraph and discourse levels (Cheng, 1994;Frantzen, 1995;Hyland & Anan, 2006;Khuwaileh & Shoumali, 2000;Kim, 2001;Tang, 2000). For example, Kim (2001) analyzed the errors in 60 Korean university EFL learners' summary writing and found that syntactic errors were the most damaging, followed closely by lexical errors.…”