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There are 32
students in the International Course of my school. Most of the classes are broken up by level and I have a lot
of freedom in regards to what and how I teach the different levels. Before summer break, I did a series of
three reading classes with the lower-intermediate students which ended by
asking them to write a short summary of a simplified newspaper article we had
been working with during the lesson.
I cradled my head in despair was
pretty shocked when a majority of students turned in nothing but a few sentence
fragments. I was pretty sure that
the problem wasn't comprehension, as we had run through a number of activities
which left both me and them confident they understood what was in the articles. And the articles themselves had come
from Sandra Heyer's All New Easy True Stories,
which I had picked, in part, because I thought the simple grammar could serve
as pretty good target examples for when students were given writing
assignments.
But after
thinking about it during summer vacation, it seemed to me that I had been
expecting quite a lot of my students.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it usually helps if
expectations are realistic. And
considering the fact that most of my students come from a non-academic
background, missed large chunks of their middle school career, and are rarely
asked to summarize in Japanese, let alone English, my expectations in this case
were just a tad bit on the flowers-spontaneously-blooming-in-the-desert
variety.
So just what
makes summarizing so difficult?
Well, as Kirkland and Saunders (1991, p. 100) rightly point out, "The
L2 skills needed in summarizing include adequate reading skills and
comprehension level plus adequate control of grammar, vocabulary, and writing
skills to manipulate and express the information." And to make things even more difficult,
summarizing, "is highly interactive and recursive process." It requires moving between reading and
writing a number of times, holding portions of the text in memory, manipulating
it, and comparing and contrasting it with what is being produced in the
summary. In light of this, it
makes sense that most articles focused on summarizing are for the EAP
community. But it seems to me that
even students of a lower proficiency level could benefit from training around
summarizing skills. As Shih (1992,
p. 307) points out, summary writing is excellent practice for tests with an
essay component. And in a few months from now, my students will be heading off
to university, many of them to major in English, and they will be asked
summarize texts as well as sit for tests with essay questions, regardless of
whether such tasks and tests could be considered level appropriate or not.
So since the
students came back from summer break I tried out some summary skills building classes. The classes were 90 minutes in length. Here's a rough outline of how I
prepared, what I did in class, and how things went down:
1. Preparation
and article selection:
First I chose an article with a clear chronological story line, something that
would be easier to summarize than say an article on global warming which might
require students to not only keep track of key ideas, but a incongruous time
line as well. I settled on "Election Day," a ~250 word simplified
news article about a man trying to become the mayor of his town. Here is the first paragraph:
The Election
Herb
Casey wants to be mayor of his city.
So he works hard. He puts
up signs. "VOTE FOR HERB
CASEY," the signs say. He
knocks on doors and talks to people.
"Please vote for me," he says. He mails letters to thousand of people. "Please vote for me," he
writes. He gives speeches. "Vote for me!" he says in his
speeches.
---
Heyer (2004)
2. Vocabulary/word
and phrase comprehension:
instead of pre-teaching vocabulary, which has it's advantages, I passed out a
worksheet which contained the full ~250 word article. When making the worksheet, instead of a standard font I used
a dotted font, the type usually reserved for writing practice. I had the students read the first
paragraph and the first paragraph only.
As they read, they were instructed to trace over every word they
knew. In this way students were
left with a nearly completed paragraph.
I find drawing students attention to what they can do as opposed to what
they can't (such as by having students circle the words they don't know)
usually starts us off on a better psychological foot. I also read the text out loud to the students. At lower levels, students often fail to
recognize words that they actually know and produce in speech. I was pretty thrilled when two of the
students, after hearing the word 'election' pronounced, traced the word on
their worksheet.
3. Comprehension
check/main point examples: Next
I gave students a question which, if answered well, would naturally lead to a
summary of the paragraph's contents.
I got this idea from Simcock's (1990) ask and answer technique (and there's a pretty good write up in
this Paul Nation article http://www.melta.org.my/ET/1991/main1.html), which is
an oral activity to build fluency activities, but which is highly adaptable for
written work. I also provided a
series of yes/no statements.
[image: student notes]
As you can see,
I did a bit of paraphrasing and word substitution within these answers. Out of 14 students in the class, all
fourteen marked the correct yes/no box for each answer. I did have to give a bit of a
description of the phrase 'face to face' and link it up with the idea of
'knocking on doors' from the paragraph from the text. While overall this seems like a basic comprehension
question/activity (and of course it is that), it also helps provide examples of
what constitutes main ideas in a paragraph and how word substitution is
perfectly acceptable when paraphrasing.
4. Increasing
text familiarity/use of structures within the text: Now that I was pretty sure students had
comprehended the text, I really wanted to give them a chance to actually do a
bit of production work with the text.
But I was pretty sure they weren't ready to jump into writing a summary
yet. I decided to do a read/think/say
+ listen/think/write
exercise (Fanselow, n.d.).
Students were put in pairs.
One student was the reader, the other the writer. The reader would read as much of the
texts as they could easily commit to memory, at which point they would turn the
paper over, count to three, and say the memorized portion of the text to their
partner. The listener, pen on
table, would wait until the reader finished speaking, count to three, pick up
their pen and write what they could on the paper. If they wanted, they could ask the reader to repeat what was
said. But the reader could not
provide assistance in the form of suggesting missing words, spelling
corrections, etc. After the
paragraph was completely transcribed in this manner, students compared what
they had written to what was on the paper. They circled any differences in red. Now some of the changes made were
perfectly acceptable substitutions or simplifications. For example, one student took the
sentences, "He gives speeches. 'Vote for me!' he says in his
speeches," and changed it to, "He gives speeches and says, 'Vote for
me.'" So not only does the read/think/say
+ listen/think/write
help students memorize a text by giving it a chance to loop around in
short-term memory (West as cited in Nation, 2009a, p. 67), it also helps
students notice that they are already have the skills necessary to paraphrase,
an important component of summarizing.
5. Personalization: I think one of the biggest hurdles to
students producing a decent summary is the distance they feel with the text
material. Even the article used
for this class, while having a strong narrative thread and being wildly slightly more interesting than your
average academic paper, was content-wise, still pretty far away from my
students' daily life. If students
were talking about themselves, they would have little trouble using the grammar
structures or even most of the vocabulary found in the article. A personalization activity is another
way to help show students that they already have many of the skills they need
to write a summary. In this case,
I helped students personalize the grammar by asking them to answer the
question, "How did you do to become a good English speaker?" The following is one student's answers:
6. Production
of first summary: well,
it's been a long process. It took
about 60 minutes of class time to get here. For this step of the process, I had the students put away
all the materials we had used up to this point and erased the white-board. Then I wrote the sentence, "Herb
Casey wants to be mayor of his town…" and started soliciting sentences to
put in our summary. What I ended
up with was:
Herb
Casey wants to be mayor of his town.
He works very hard. He puts
up signs. He talks to lots of
people. He asks people for their
votes.
7. Winnowing
it down: Chambers and
Brigham (as cited in Nation, 2009a) suggest a process of winnowing away a text
with a group of learners, deleting elaborating sentences, unnecessary clauses
from main sentences, and finally any remaining unnecessary words. It seems like a great idea for showing
higher level students how to carve their way to a decent summary. But I also think it requires a pretty
complete comprehension of the text and wouldn't work very well with lower level
students right off the bat. But as
a final step in this process, it worked quite well and only took about 5
minutes in total. By this point of
the process, students were really primed to simplify and came up with the
following:
Herb
Casey wants to be mayor of his town so worked very hard. He puts up signs, talked to lots of
people and asked for their votes.
The entire
process from start to finish took seventy-five minutes. But the next day, when I ran the
class again, it took a total of 40 minutes per paragraph.
Modifying the
process:
Like the act of
summarizing itself, one of the benefits of using a detailed, step by step
process like that above, is the fact that it can be simplified and
condensed. Both comprehension
checks and personalization were put aside when students in my class were
working to summarize the third paragraph within "The Election"
article. And once students can
summarize articles with a strong linear narrative, they can be exposed to
different and potentially more difficult genres of text, such as simplified
government reports or academic articles.
And when exposed to a new genre, steps which had become superfluous with
previous genres can be reinserted as necessary.
As Newman and
Strever (1997) say, "if a student can decipher the meaning of an article,
differentiate the main ideas from the details, and transfer that knowledge into
writing, then many teachers would feel the student has understood the
material." By helping even
lower-intermediate students develop the skills necessary to summarize, we
provide both ourselves and them with an important tool to measure their
comprehension of a text. But more
than that, we are preparing them for the ways in which they will be using
English in the future. Because
waiting to teach a set of skills until they have suddenly become necessary for
language production, is a recipe for a classroom with an overabundance of
stress, an emotion better left out of a summary of any successful language
classroom.
References:
Fanselow,
J. (nip). Albabka fur: tapping students' positive feelings about oral reading
and overcoming their dread of the activity.
Heyer,
S. (2004). The Election. All New Easy True Stories: A Picture-Based
Beginning Reader.
Pearson Longman.
Kirkland, R.
& Saunders, M. (1991). Maximiing student performance in summary writing:
managing cognitive load. TESOL Quarterly 25 (1):
105-121
Nation,
I.S.P. (2009a). Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. Routledge: New York.
Nation,
I.S.P. (2009b) Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. Routledge: New York.
Newman,
K. & Strever, J. (1997). Using electronic peer audience and summary writing
with ESL students. Journal of College Reading and Learning 28 (1): 24-
Shih, M.
(1992). Beyond comprehension
exercises in the ESL academic reading class. TESOL Quarterly 26 (2): 289-318
