Summarizing – the most frequently assigned but rarely explicitly taught strategy

How often do you require your students to summarize a passage? According to Reading for Understanding, students struggle with writing summaries for one of two reasons: they can't figure out what is important, or they can't decide what to leave out. (Sounds like Mosaic of Thought “Two Student Readers” to me.)

Authors in this program took time to teach their students how to summarize. The following describes their methods.

Students began by reading an article on the importance of an extensive vocabulary for success in the business world. They then broke in to six groups, each group taking a different paragraph, starting with the second paragraph of the article. Teachers then modeled one process for summarizing using the first paragraph. Using an overhead, they went through the text thinking aloud as they underlined phrases that they thought were the most important and explaining how they were making their decisions. Teachers then composed sentences that included the information in the phrases but not copying word for word.

Working independently students then underlined what they considered to be the most important phrases in their assigned paragraph. Groups then got together to come to a consensus as to what was essential. Then working independently again, students wrote one sentence that included the ideas from the chosen phrase but not word for word. Groups then met again to hear the members’ sentences and chose one, or construct one, which would represent their paragraph. (Sound like our professor has been putting this into practice on us.)

The summary sentence that the teacher had come up with for the first paragraph was put on the board, and then each subsequent group added their summary sentence. Even though these new summary paragraphs lack transition words and elegance, the main idea of the article was clearly portrayed.

Discussions were held regarding what makes a good summary. The class decided on the following criteria:
• shorter than the text,
• contained the most important information,
• left out details and examples,

Other activities were then given to help reinforce this new skill. Metacognitive connections were made as students were asked to reflect on and share the process they used to summarize a text.

Predicting

Next, teachers introduced the third tool of predicting. Using the idea of the nightly news, teachers pointed out that the weather report was a very different part of the broadcast. This led to a discussion about how meteorologists make predictions based on signs that they see and experience. Students were given ideas on several signs which they could use to make predictions in their reading. A few examples are titles, clues in the narrative, and a list of some signal structures that tell readers what moves the author is about to make. Teachers pointed out to students the difference between making a prediction or foreshadowing of a literary piece and predicting the moves of the text.

The fourth tool students were given for their tool belt was clarifying. Tune in next time to learn more about that.