Summary: | This study examines performance of summary writing of 14 Japanese students.
Participants completed a summary task on two pre-selected texts at the beginning of an
eight-month exchange program and then revised or rewrote the summaries at the end of the
program. Students' original and revised drafts were analyzed in terms of 1) number of
important points/ideas included from the source texts; 2) number of single summary
sentences that combined important points from the source texts; 3) number of topic
sentences invented to summarize source paragraph(s) or text(s); and 4) number of
sentences that were paraphrased or copied from the source texts. Apart from these textual
analyses, students' own perceptions of their summary writing tasks were also collected
through a follow-up interview after they completed the second drafts. Results show that
most of the students included half or more of the ten important points identified by two
doctoral students who were native speakers of English. Students included more than half of
the important points using the reproduction strategy. Most of them used paraphrasing and
partial copying, while a third of the students used exact copying. Most of the students
applied the combination strategy at least once in each draft, but half of the students
included only 50% or fewer important points using this strategy. When students combined
important points, no one used exact copying, a third of students used partial copying and
most of them used paraphrasing. Results also show that most of the students could write
topic sentences using their own words. A third of the students wrote topic sentences by
copying the titles of the original texts, but in contrast, almost the same number of students
produced their topic sentences totally in their own words. The writing and interview data
revealed that most of the students had difficulties in comprehending the source texts or the
writing task, and many were not aware of summary writing strategies. Results suggest that
some students copied rather than using their own words because of difficulties with the
source texts, or because of their lack of confidence in their own English competence or
cultural differences. === Education, Faculty of === Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of === Graduate
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