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Producing a written summary is claimed to be a
difficult mission to accomplish for many EFL learners. Arab learners of English generally
complain that writing is the most difficult skill to perform. For the Arab learners,
producing a clear and a coherent text with few or no mistakes is difficult. Mistakes
include word order, choice of vocabulary, grammar, spelling, punctuation, and choice of
style. This difficulty is due to the considerable difference in the structure between
English and the learner's primary language.
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Also, writing in an economical and purposeful
manner fundamentally requires a special overall linguistic competence and efficiency
level, which of course varies from one language user to another.
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Let me attempt to explain six successful
techniques for summary writing that I implemented with my students in a pre-service EFL
teacher training college. Please bear in mind that the proficiency levels of the students
range between intermediate and upper-intermediate, with the majority falling in the latter
category.
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- List five (or more) words on the board and ask the students to individually produce a
narrative or a descriptive piece of writing depending on the type of words provided.
Insist that they should not exceed five sentences, that is, using one of the words
in each sentence. To make the exercise more focused and competitive, you can time it. The
reason I said "competitive" lies in the fact that this activity can be arranged
in the form of a game.
- Prepare and photocopy different reading texts. Ask the students to silently read a text
and underline the key words in the text. This activity helps the students focus their
attention on the most important lexical items. Following the activity the teacher and
students can clarify and justify the choices of certain words or phrases in a class
discussion.
- Prepare a long reading text with some questions related to the main points of the text.
Ask the students to silently read the text and try to find the answers to the questions.
Insist on full answers. Once the students finish answering all the questions, they
will see a summary that was built up in front of them.
- Ask the class to read a text. Following the silent reading, conduct an open discussion
about the main points or events found. Write all the proposed ideas and points on the
board. Ask the class to expand the ideas on the board in order to form a summary. During
the expansion stage it is recommended to ask the students to close their books to avoid
any copying attempts.
- Prepare a text and a summary of the text with gaps in it for a cloze exercise. The cloze
activity will help the student: (a) to identify the key words and place them in the
appropriate blanks; and (b) to see a model summary after all the blanks are filled in.
- Give a talk/lecture on a certain topic, preferably of a direct use and interest to the
students, and ask them to take notes. Later, ask them to read out their notes and put what
is relevant on the board. The notes on the board can then be expanded to form a summary
about the talk/lecture. A word limit should be an integral condition of the summary
exercise. This type of activity trains the learners to follow formal talks and contributes
to sharpening their note-taking skill. Note-taking, as is well known, is an integrated
activity that leads to the proficiency of the important skill, summarizing.
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It is certainly worth mentioning that all these
activities and techniques were preceded by exposing the students to different types of
summaries from various types of materials. Examples include tables, grids, and charts.
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To conclude, summarizing is a highly challenging
activity for the students because it compels them to think in an economical way and to
produce alternative language while maintaining the same ideas.
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