Teaching summary writing through direct instruction to improve test comprehension for students in ESL/EFL classroom

Abstract

In this paper, I will show how teaching summary writing through direct instruction helps students develop text comprehension in ESL/EFL settings. In the first part, I will overview reading-writing connections, introduce Reader-Response Theory, and discuss summary as a primary reading-writing activity. In the second part, I will first briefly define a summary, and then discuss summary for text comprehension, general factors influencing summary writing, and the process of summary writing. More specifically, in the section discussing the summary writing process, I will compare good and poor summarizers, and examine how different L1 and L2 writers' use of paraphrase in summary writing. Then, the recursive nature of summary writing and process rules of summary writing will be further discussed. In addition, I will describe direct instruction on summary writing and how to give feedback on students' summary writing in the later section of the second part. Lastly, I will describe pedagogical application of summary writing in South Korea.