Summary writing by young children

“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.