“Summary writing by young children” written by Karl K. Taylor in
Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Spring, 1986), pp. 193-208.
(Reading Research Quarterly is currently published by International Reading Association.)
The purpose of this study is to examine how fourth- and fifth-grade students write summaries of both expository and narrative prose and to see where the problems and difficulties are in their writing process. And the author takes two methods to do experiments for individual children and group setting. The general findings are “these children had no more difficulty summarizing expository than narrative prose, performance on a standardized reading test did not predict accurately their ability to find and state the main idea in their written summaries, and that their written responses are a little vague for a general audience to understand.” Besides, few children can find and explain the moral in the narrative. They have a rather superficial understanding of the difference between expository and narrative prose and own few skills in note taking or text marking.
Basically, older students are much better than younger ones in identifying the most important elements in a text. So, in some research, “Brown and Smiley (1978) found special instruction helped high school and college students remember the more important elements of text; fifth- and eighth-grade students were not as successful because they could not distinguish the important from the unimportant.” For example, several of the children will be confused that the most unusual or unfamiliar ideas should be chosen. They think a good summary should contain what the audience would like to know and not just the important ideas in the article. This is an interesting phenomenon because this is somewhat linked to egocentrism. Their selection is only based on what interested them or what they think their classmates will enjoy learning.
Moreover, the author mentions some points I agree with very much about what’s a successful summarizer. The first difference identified is in how soon the subjects begin mentally summarizing and planning what they are going to say. That is to say, successful summarizers will begin drawing conclusions and delete unessential details as they are reading. However, instead of taking brief notes or organizing their thoughts, the unsuccessful writers begin working immediately on their summaries. Secondly “Awareness of structure” will also seem to be important information for summarizer. According to this information, the summarizer will know where to look for important material and what to skip. And I think being familiar with the structure of the article will make the writers save time to find the main ideas, such as the topic sentence usually appears in the beginning of the every paragraph. And the next is about generalizing, in fact, the ability to recognize structure is also related to generalizing skills. Those who did well had the ability to stand back from an article, look at it objectively for structure, and draw some generalizations.
And there is another finding in the study I am also interested in. “Although use of their own words was not a major problem, the two kinds of summarizers had different views of what was required in this task.” Some students think that finding words to substitute for the author's is the most difficult thing when writing a summary, but some students say they have difficulty finding and stating the main idea. Actually summary is a difficult and complex task because you have to find the main ideas, and think how to organize them, and then write them down by using your own skills. So it is not an enough good summary if the writer just finds some words to replace the original vocabulary. And this is a general mistake seen in summary of initial learners.
2007年12月25日 星期二
2007年12月24日 星期一
Textual borrowing strategy
In the article “The use of paraphrase in summary writing: a comparison of L1 and L2 writers” written by Casey Keck in English Department, PO Box 6032, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011, United States, the author mentions that “paraphrasing is considered by many to be an important skill for academic writing, and some have argued that the teaching of paraphrasing might help students avoid copying from source texts. Few studies, however, have investigated the ways in which both L1 and L2 academic writers already use paraphrasing as a textual borrowing strategy when completing their academic assignments.” So the author does a study to further understand university students’ paraphrasing strategies.
The methods the author used is to analyze L1 and L2 writers’ use of paraphrase within a summary task and the author also develop a method for classifying these paraphrases into four major Paraphrase Types: Near Copy, Minimal Revision, Moderate Revision, and Substantial Revision. After comparing the L1 and L2 writers’ use of these Paraphrase Types, the author discovered though both groups used about five paraphrases in a summary, L2 writers used more Near Copies than L1 writers. By contrast, the summaries of L1 writers used more Moderate and Substantial Revisions than the L2 writers. And based on the comparison, there is an important issue worth to be discussed about students’ textual borrowing strategies because L2 writers use much more Near Copies in their summary. And this issue also can be linked to plagiarism and how to teach paraphrase in university.
In my opinion, paraphrasing appears to be a major way for summary writing at the college level. And in the article the author also points out those participants mostly are in the first year of their university, so the first-year composition courses usually serve students with paraphrasing when summary skills are introduced. So, actually, the most important thing is the instructor should design writing programs to teach students how to paraphrase well, because one important function of the paraphrase is to help a writer rewrite other author’s ideas without copying them exactly. And this is an essential skill for students to do summary writing.
Besides, according to this study or other studies, “While most L1 writers did not use Near Copy paraphrases in their summaries, most L2 writers used at least one, and half used two or more.” and “Chinese participants (also university students) used nearly copied strings of the original text more frequently than English speakers.” Therefore, how to instruct students, especially for L2, about correct idea for textual borrowing strategy becomes a very necessary and important thing. If there is a future research to provide more information, I think the instructor can begin to find out specific paraphrasing strategies to help L1 andL2 writers not to mistake copying as a textual borrowing strategy and help university students become confident and successful academic writers.
The methods the author used is to analyze L1 and L2 writers’ use of paraphrase within a summary task and the author also develop a method for classifying these paraphrases into four major Paraphrase Types: Near Copy, Minimal Revision, Moderate Revision, and Substantial Revision. After comparing the L1 and L2 writers’ use of these Paraphrase Types, the author discovered though both groups used about five paraphrases in a summary, L2 writers used more Near Copies than L1 writers. By contrast, the summaries of L1 writers used more Moderate and Substantial Revisions than the L2 writers. And based on the comparison, there is an important issue worth to be discussed about students’ textual borrowing strategies because L2 writers use much more Near Copies in their summary. And this issue also can be linked to plagiarism and how to teach paraphrase in university.
In my opinion, paraphrasing appears to be a major way for summary writing at the college level. And in the article the author also points out those participants mostly are in the first year of their university, so the first-year composition courses usually serve students with paraphrasing when summary skills are introduced. So, actually, the most important thing is the instructor should design writing programs to teach students how to paraphrase well, because one important function of the paraphrase is to help a writer rewrite other author’s ideas without copying them exactly. And this is an essential skill for students to do summary writing.
Besides, according to this study or other studies, “While most L1 writers did not use Near Copy paraphrases in their summaries, most L2 writers used at least one, and half used two or more.” and “Chinese participants (also university students) used nearly copied strings of the original text more frequently than English speakers.” Therefore, how to instruct students, especially for L2, about correct idea for textual borrowing strategy becomes a very necessary and important thing. If there is a future research to provide more information, I think the instructor can begin to find out specific paraphrasing strategies to help L1 andL2 writers not to mistake copying as a textual borrowing strategy and help university students become confident and successful academic writers.
2007年12月20日 星期四
The necessary of strategy instruction for summary writing
In the article “Effects of Strategy Instruction on Summary Writing of college Students” written by Rosalie Friend, Hunter College of the City University of New York, the author mainly does a research about what summarization instruction conditions should be and they will be more effective to help students. The author mentions T. A. van Dijk and W. Kintsch’s (1983) text-processing theory several times and the results of the study give one more affirmative to this theory.
The author’s method to do this research is to practice an experiment: College freshmen registered in a prefreshman writing course were randomly assigned to three conditions for 2 days of classroom instruction to write a summary. And summarization instruction conditions were argument repetition or generalization with a control group taught to examine personal judgments of importance. And then the author will do an analysis of test summaries.
Actually, the text-processing theory of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) implicates “argument repetition in the text as a key factor in microprocessing and generalization as a key cognitive process in macroprocessing,” two important elements of reading. This study also showed the role of argument repetition and generalization in the cognitive processes of summarization by contrasting them in an instructional study. And according to the experiment, “direct instruction comparing strategies using argument repetition or generalization enabled students to make better judgments of importance than a control group; generalization was even stronger than argument repetition for helping generation of a thesis statement.” So, most importantly, aimed to reading or writing instruction, students should be directed to construct main ideas and theses, not try to select them from the surface structure of text.
In my opinion, summary writing should be taught by some strategies, not just ask students to write down something important in their mind. Because students are learners to need to be directed and if you don’t give them some directions, it will cost them much time to contract a clear summary. Although students can be progressive to know how to make a thesis statement by degree, the strategies can help them effectively to do better. Every method has its own value, and good instruction will make students learn better and more effectively, so why do we let students fumble by themselves?
The author’s method to do this research is to practice an experiment: College freshmen registered in a prefreshman writing course were randomly assigned to three conditions for 2 days of classroom instruction to write a summary. And summarization instruction conditions were argument repetition or generalization with a control group taught to examine personal judgments of importance. And then the author will do an analysis of test summaries.
Actually, the text-processing theory of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) implicates “argument repetition in the text as a key factor in microprocessing and generalization as a key cognitive process in macroprocessing,” two important elements of reading. This study also showed the role of argument repetition and generalization in the cognitive processes of summarization by contrasting them in an instructional study. And according to the experiment, “direct instruction comparing strategies using argument repetition or generalization enabled students to make better judgments of importance than a control group; generalization was even stronger than argument repetition for helping generation of a thesis statement.” So, most importantly, aimed to reading or writing instruction, students should be directed to construct main ideas and theses, not try to select them from the surface structure of text.
In my opinion, summary writing should be taught by some strategies, not just ask students to write down something important in their mind. Because students are learners to need to be directed and if you don’t give them some directions, it will cost them much time to contract a clear summary. Although students can be progressive to know how to make a thesis statement by degree, the strategies can help them effectively to do better. Every method has its own value, and good instruction will make students learn better and more effectively, so why do we let students fumble by themselves?
2007年12月18日 星期二
Summary writng as a de-center exercise
In general, we all know summary writing is a good exercise for thinking skills because we have to think about both the original article and the new summary. However, after reading this article, “Summary Writing, Rogerian Listening, and Dialectic Thinking.” written by John C. Bean. Seattle University, I get a very interesting point about the wonderful function of summary writing. That is the summary writing can be considered to be a de-center exercise for students. In the article, “In summarizing another person’s ideas, the student must abandon his or her own perspective to assume what is often an unfamiliar point of view.” So, students must learn to be objective to express other person’s thoughts, and are careful to avoid adding their own concepts. In fact, this is a difficult task for students because the author mentions “egocentrism”.
According to Piaget who does a deep research in cognitive psychology, “an egocentric thinker sees the world from a single point of view…but without knowledge of the existence of other viewpoints of perspectives and without awareness that he is the prisoner of his own.” Although almost of us are not a serious and obvious egocentric thinker, it is not denied that sometimes we still will not be absolutely objective because we are lively human beings. Therefore, I think it is a good concept to regard summary writing as “a particularly effective tool for helping students overcome egocentrism” You should tell yourself “It’s just saying other people’s thoughts”, “It doesn’t allow any creativity”, “and I can put myself into it.” Those remindings seem clear and easy, but actually it is not easy to achieve them.
Besides, the author also mentions about “Rogerian Listening” as a related skill to summary writing. The concept of Rogerian argument as set forth in Young, Becker, and Pike’s Rhetoric: Discovery and change. The authors argue that before composing a persuasive essay the writer should “listen” to others position and understand others feelings and thoughts very empathically, so “such listening, Roger believes that, takes courage because the act of listening to the external world challenges the security of the writer’s initial ideas.” Therefore, in some degree, summary writing can be seen as a communication between the original author and rewriter. Because the rewriter should take the perspective of the author seriously and listen to it in detail, the rewriter doesn’t have the wrong comprehension. Maybe we can say reading is a silent listening in mind. So, listening to other person’s thoughts is an important thing for learners because the world of knowledge is so great that we just touch a smallest part.
According to Piaget who does a deep research in cognitive psychology, “an egocentric thinker sees the world from a single point of view…but without knowledge of the existence of other viewpoints of perspectives and without awareness that he is the prisoner of his own.” Although almost of us are not a serious and obvious egocentric thinker, it is not denied that sometimes we still will not be absolutely objective because we are lively human beings. Therefore, I think it is a good concept to regard summary writing as “a particularly effective tool for helping students overcome egocentrism” You should tell yourself “It’s just saying other people’s thoughts”, “It doesn’t allow any creativity”, “and I can put myself into it.” Those remindings seem clear and easy, but actually it is not easy to achieve them.
Besides, the author also mentions about “Rogerian Listening” as a related skill to summary writing. The concept of Rogerian argument as set forth in Young, Becker, and Pike’s Rhetoric: Discovery and change. The authors argue that before composing a persuasive essay the writer should “listen” to others position and understand others feelings and thoughts very empathically, so “such listening, Roger believes that, takes courage because the act of listening to the external world challenges the security of the writer’s initial ideas.” Therefore, in some degree, summary writing can be seen as a communication between the original author and rewriter. Because the rewriter should take the perspective of the author seriously and listen to it in detail, the rewriter doesn’t have the wrong comprehension. Maybe we can say reading is a silent listening in mind. So, listening to other person’s thoughts is an important thing for learners because the world of knowledge is so great that we just touch a smallest part.
Constraints for summary writing
After reading the article “Maximizing Students Performance in Summary Writing: Managing Cognitive Load”, I have further understand about summary writing.” written by Margaret and Mary Anne. In the article, differed from my thinking about a good summary itself, it main disserts that students should have some internal constraints so that they can do well in summary writing. And those internal constraints focused on here are: L2 proficiency, content schemata, affect, formal schemata, cognitive skills, and metacognitive skills. In other word, the authors all pay more attention on the writers’ reading and writing skills, not the summary itself. After I have read this article, I agree with some points very much. For example, the authors mention that “Students should not be expected to produce formal, graded academic summaries until they have at least a high-intermediate level of language proficiency.” If you are not enough familiar to the second language and can not use it well on your daily life, it is impossible for you to use it to write down something. And reading skills and comprehension level are also very important to contribute to summary writing. Because you must own at least high-intermediate comprehension level about the article, you can write down the right information from the article precisely.
And then it is worth to notice that students must have some specific schemata, such as owning proper content schemata available is also be able to comprehend the reading material for students. In addition to this one, formal schemata is also a important one to help students to write a good summary because the teacher can “train students in the special conventions of summaries: the type of material appropriate in introductions, how to acknowledge the source, when to quote, and how to paraphrase.” Those detail you must notice and ask yourself when writing a summary, I also suggest that students can follow a basic and typical pattern that teacher gives to do summarizing in the beginning.
Beside, the authors also mentions “there is a three-way, mutually dependent relationship among the skills of decision making, evaluation and selection” in the area of cognitive skill. I like the idea about when you write a summary, it is a process to go through evaluation, selection and decision making. That is to say, you will evaluate the source materials and select appropriate concept for use in your summary, and you also use both skills to do decision making. So, summary writing looks like that you just write down the main ideas from the original article, but actually it concludes a lot of skills for students to learn, especially the complicated cognitive skills.
And then it is worth to notice that students must have some specific schemata, such as owning proper content schemata available is also be able to comprehend the reading material for students. In addition to this one, formal schemata is also a important one to help students to write a good summary because the teacher can “train students in the special conventions of summaries: the type of material appropriate in introductions, how to acknowledge the source, when to quote, and how to paraphrase.” Those detail you must notice and ask yourself when writing a summary, I also suggest that students can follow a basic and typical pattern that teacher gives to do summarizing in the beginning.
Beside, the authors also mentions “there is a three-way, mutually dependent relationship among the skills of decision making, evaluation and selection” in the area of cognitive skill. I like the idea about when you write a summary, it is a process to go through evaluation, selection and decision making. That is to say, you will evaluate the source materials and select appropriate concept for use in your summary, and you also use both skills to do decision making. So, summary writing looks like that you just write down the main ideas from the original article, but actually it concludes a lot of skills for students to learn, especially the complicated cognitive skills.
My thinking about good summary
In the past, we seldom have class that the teacher main teaches students how to write a good summary. I remember that my teachers had ever taught us how to write a letter and post card in high school, but they never spent a lot of time to teach us how to write a good summary. In my experience, the training way about summary writing was that the teacher just gave us a short article, and asked us to summarize it. And of course, I summarized the English article just like I summed up the Chinese article. And the result was there were many strange mistakes would be produced in my summary. But for me, practicing to write a summary over and over again is the only way to prove my summary writing.
Therefore, according to my own experiences and suggestions from other people, there are some qualities should belong to a good summary itself. Firstly, appropriate summary length is very important. Actually the shorter the summary is, the harder the task is. Because you have to rewrite and fit the author’s conception precisely in a much shorter article length. If the summary is too long, it is not a clear, concise, and helpful work to make readers have a quick and easy comprehension about the original article. But if the summary is too short to understand the conception the author seeks to express, it also loses its function. So a good summary writer should adjust the length of summary based on the length of original article. Secondly, you should rewrite a new paragraph in your own word to tell readers what the author expresses in the article. It should be avoided to use the same words from the article in your writing, except for those particular proper nouns. This skill can show whether you comprehend the article clearly and completely, and then you can write it down through your own thinking. Thirdly, you know what the main point is in the article and your summary can include those main ideas. We have to focus on the base function of a summary, that is, a good summary should help readers have an overview about the article in the beginning. So if a summary loses this important function, it is not a good summary for me.
Therefore, according to my own experiences and suggestions from other people, there are some qualities should belong to a good summary itself. Firstly, appropriate summary length is very important. Actually the shorter the summary is, the harder the task is. Because you have to rewrite and fit the author’s conception precisely in a much shorter article length. If the summary is too long, it is not a clear, concise, and helpful work to make readers have a quick and easy comprehension about the original article. But if the summary is too short to understand the conception the author seeks to express, it also loses its function. So a good summary writer should adjust the length of summary based on the length of original article. Secondly, you should rewrite a new paragraph in your own word to tell readers what the author expresses in the article. It should be avoided to use the same words from the article in your writing, except for those particular proper nouns. This skill can show whether you comprehend the article clearly and completely, and then you can write it down through your own thinking. Thirdly, you know what the main point is in the article and your summary can include those main ideas. We have to focus on the base function of a summary, that is, a good summary should help readers have an overview about the article in the beginning. So if a summary loses this important function, it is not a good summary for me.
2007年12月5日 星期三
The reflective summary of the discussion on “Interactive Language Teaching”
In chapter 11-“Interactive language teaching-initiating interaction”, it main describes the interactive principles, the roles of interactive teacher and the function of questioning strategies. After reading the whole chapter, I produce two questions for classmates to discuss, and in the following I summarize their opinions for discussion.
1. In five roles of the teacher mentioned above, which one do you think is most appropriate? Please state your reason.
Because I think a teacher must play a lot of roles in the course of teaching, there are many metaphors used for describing a teacher. In the textbook, the author lists five roles to describe an interactive teacher. Maybe for a teacher who handles with good interaction, the roles are not same to the generally traditional teacher. So I hope classmates can discuss which role do they think is most appropriate for an interactive teacher. And basically in their opinion, they think the manager of a company is the best metaphor. A successful manager can govern the whole company and keep all employees to have the same goal, but does not absolutely control their all behaviors. The manager still gives all employees freedom to develop their personal unique ability. So a good teacher should build up a complete lesson structure, and students can still have room to show their creativity. That is, the teacher can design an interesting lesson and clearly tell students the main objective the teacher hopes they can achieve. But students can add some their own opinions to make the whole process more lividly. The teacher gives students a larger direction, and must believe students so that students can get free to develop their own creativity, just like the manger of company must believe all employees so that they have a happy cooperation and interaction.
2. Do you think how does a teacher handle the proportion of display and referential questions according to students’ level? Why?
Display question means the questioner has already known the answer and just seeks to elicit responses from other people, and referential question means the questioner really request the information. Generally speaking, the higher level students are, the more referential questions the teacher can use. If you use too many referential questions when you teach the students of the lower level, they usually can not give you deeper feedback and there is no room for discussion between you and your students because they only have learned easier knowledge. So, it is more meaningless to discuss with or request information from the students of the lower level. On the contrary, the higher level students perhaps can provide some more interesting opinions to surprise the teacher because the teacher does not think of that. So there is a larger space to think and discuss between teacher and student.
1. In five roles of the teacher mentioned above, which one do you think is most appropriate? Please state your reason.
Because I think a teacher must play a lot of roles in the course of teaching, there are many metaphors used for describing a teacher. In the textbook, the author lists five roles to describe an interactive teacher. Maybe for a teacher who handles with good interaction, the roles are not same to the generally traditional teacher. So I hope classmates can discuss which role do they think is most appropriate for an interactive teacher. And basically in their opinion, they think the manager of a company is the best metaphor. A successful manager can govern the whole company and keep all employees to have the same goal, but does not absolutely control their all behaviors. The manager still gives all employees freedom to develop their personal unique ability. So a good teacher should build up a complete lesson structure, and students can still have room to show their creativity. That is, the teacher can design an interesting lesson and clearly tell students the main objective the teacher hopes they can achieve. But students can add some their own opinions to make the whole process more lividly. The teacher gives students a larger direction, and must believe students so that students can get free to develop their own creativity, just like the manger of company must believe all employees so that they have a happy cooperation and interaction.
2. Do you think how does a teacher handle the proportion of display and referential questions according to students’ level? Why?
Display question means the questioner has already known the answer and just seeks to elicit responses from other people, and referential question means the questioner really request the information. Generally speaking, the higher level students are, the more referential questions the teacher can use. If you use too many referential questions when you teach the students of the lower level, they usually can not give you deeper feedback and there is no room for discussion between you and your students because they only have learned easier knowledge. So, it is more meaningless to discuss with or request information from the students of the lower level. On the contrary, the higher level students perhaps can provide some more interesting opinions to surprise the teacher because the teacher does not think of that. So there is a larger space to think and discuss between teacher and student.
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