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.