Summarizing strategies of Taiwanese undergraduate English majors

• Main Authors: Yen-fen Liu, 劉燕芬
• Other Authors: Robert L. Good
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/64971478372907214117

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語研究所 === 100 === This study investigates Taiwanese English majors’ knowledge of the features of a good summary, their cognitive and metacognitive strategies used while writing summaries, and whether students’ claims about what they do are consistent with their actual behavior in their written summaries. Specific strategies investigated included selection, deletion, combination of idea units, and copying; summary accuracy was also examined. A total of 32 third-year English majors at National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology in Taiwan participated in the study. At the beginning of the study, students completed two parts of a questionnaire asking about students’ background information and their perceptions about the features that characterize a good summary. They then wrote three summaries, two of which were analyzed for the study, and completed a brief survey after reading each assigned article and writing the summary for it. The third part of the questionnaire was administered after the final summary to investigate the strategies they said they used during the summarizing process. The summaries were based on three language-related articles. The main findings of the current study are as follows: 1. Participants in the study have some knowledge about the basic requirements of a good summary. They reported that they understood that a summary should be shorter than the original article; main points should be included; minor points should be excluded; summaries should accurately reflect the original by not distorting the original meaning or adding extraneous information or opinions; and direct copying was not acceptable. 2. The most frequently used cognitive strategy was underlining or highlighting main ideas in the original article. They used this strategy during each phase of the writing process; that is, they used it when reading the articles to note the main points. They also used the highlighted points to write their summaries. After they finished a summary, they used them to evaluate it. 3. As for students’ performance on writing the two main summaries, selecting main ideas and combining of content ideas are two strategies that students did not perform well on in the current study. The researcher-imposed length limitation of about one page may have contributed to the limited number of important idea units that students included in their summaries. In contrast, participants deleted most of the less important ideas in their summaries to shorten their summaries. Students may not have known how to combine content ideas effectively or understood their importance in condensing an article. Furthermore, even though most of the students claimed that they did not copy but might have paraphrased sentences from the original text, most did in fact copy at least one sentence, and some copied extensively. As for the two features of summary accuracy, distortion and intrusion, students’ claim of what they did was also contradicted by their actual behavior in their summaries. They claimed they did not add information that was not stated in the text, but in fact, some participants did. Some also distorted the original meaning of some of the ideas when they wrote their summaries. The researcher concluded that students’ understanding of summary writing strategies did not always match their application of these strategies in actual summary writing tasks. The results also show that students need more instruction on writing a good summary and opportunities to practice summarizing with instructors’ feedback, especially on areas such as selecting main ideas, combining idea units, and paraphrasing idea units in lieu of direct copying.