THE EFFECT OF SUMMARY WRITING ON

READING COMPREHENSION:
THE ROLE OF MEDIATION IN EFL CLASSROOM

YANG GAO
Kent State University

Reading teachers focus more on the instruction of reading content or

strategies, but pay relatively less attention to the impact of writing on
reading comprehension. Based on mediation theory, the author ex-
amined the effect of summary writing about reading texts on readers'
comprehension. By reviewing relevant literatures on the topic of read-
ing and writing connections, the author explained how summarization
as a way to guide Englisb-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners to
read and leam improves their reading abilities. One implication for
teaching reading is that compared with exclusive reading instruction,
an interactive model of reading and writing can better improve EFL
readers' comprehension.
Keywords: summary writing, reading comprehension, mediation the-
ory, EFL learners

Introduction Reading and Writing Connections

The interrelation between reading and
writing has been taken for granted by a ma-
jority of scholars and researchers (Ferris
& Hedgecock, 1998; Lee, 2000; Nelson
& Calfee, 1998); however, compared with
the research on either of the two individual
skills, the studies on their connections are
much fewer. The topic indeed should be paid
more attention, due to the undeniably strong
connections between reading and writing.
Rodriguez (2006) stated, "Good writers are
good readers... good reading is the key to
becoming a good writer" (pp. 5-6). Graham
and Herbert (2011) also concluded: "Reading
is critical to students' success in and out of
school. One potential means for improving
students' reading is writing." The present pa-
per elaborates the effects of siunmary writing
on EFL readers' reading comprehension. The
analysis is based on the tenets of mediation
theory in language learning, which is derived
from \^gotsky's sociocultural theory.
A group of researchers found that both
reading and writing get learners actively en-
gaged in constructing meaning (Lee, 2000;
Nelson & Calfee, 1998; Risemberg, 1996;
Shen, 2007). Scheme theory, which originally
proposes that readers need to activate their
schemata before they read a text, can also be
applied to writing process. Noyce and Chris-
tie (1989) found that a writer utilizes the same
schemata as used for reading comprehension.
To write a topic, writers also need to activate
their prior knowledge (schemata). To this end,
reading and writing share the same compo-
nent, that is, the background knowledge; they
both incorporate the prior knowledge into
learners' learning. Besides prior knowledge,
some of the same meta/cognitive factors are
also involved in both reading and writing pro-
cesses. This corresponds to \^gostky's (1978)
thought: what children do and say while read-
ing and writing can provide evidence to their
mental activity or higher order of cognitive
processing.

43
44 / Reading Improvement
Apart from the similarity in activating read-
ers' schemata, for adult readers, reading and
writing also share other traits, one of which is
that tíiey both highly involve the three cueing
systems of the language, namely, grapho-pho-
nics, syntax, and semantics. Take the bottom-up
reading model as an instance, reading generally
happens in the following sequence: readers get
knowledge input sequentially from the gra-
pho-phonics (letter-sound) to the syntax (struc-
ture), and at last to the semantics (meaning).
The same components are also iavolved in the
writing process, with only a different sequence:
writers produce outputfromthe semantics to the
syntax and grapho-phonics. Therefore, as read-
ing is a good way to get the input, and writing
is an effective approach to produce output or re-
inforee the input. It is evident to encourage stu-
dents to combine the two skills together and use
an interactive approach to improve their learn-
ing. Nelson and Calfee (1998) hypothesized that
a rhetorical approach helps readers and writers,
by being thereceiverand the sender, to increase
their awareness of communication.
It is also suggested that language learners
should be encouraged to use eitiier of the two
skills to compensate the other. This can be divid-
ed into two types of compensation: reading-tt)-
write and writing-to-read. Researchers used to
focus more on the reading-to-write strategy, be-
cause reading is more direct to get the knowledge
input and less time-consuming than writing; it is
more practical forresearchersto get convenient
samples or for teachers to put it into classroom
practice. As forreading-to-writestudies, most of
what we know focuses on task representation,
cognition of reading-to-write, and summarizing
texts (Ruiz-Funes, 1999a; 1999b; 2001). There
are nonetheless less amount of literatures on
writing-to-read studies.
Effects of Summary Writing on Reading
Comprehension
While research on summary writing gains
relatively less attention from scholars, it also
emerges in recent years. In a meta-analysis
study, Graham and Herbert (2011) concluded
that *Svriting about material read improves
students' comprehension of it; that teach-
ing students how to write improves their
reading comprehension, reading fluency,
and word reading; and that increasing how
much students write enhances their reading
comprehension". Zhou and Siriyothin (2008)
did a pilot study on effects of reading tasks
on reading comprehension. They took 72
Chinese EFL students as their participants
and found that reading with summary writing
or journal writing could be a good way for
these EFL learners to improve their reading
ability. Yamada (2002) selected Japanese
intermediate EFL writers and investigated
whether they would be able to summarize and
integrate source texts without being heavily
dependent on them. The study showed that
tasks with greater degree of inference helped
the students to generate information more
independently out of the source texts. Emam
(2011) conducted a study in which 120 EFL
students in Iran were involved. The study
divided the students into 4 groups, with one
control and three experimental groups. Three
experimental groups were exposed in differ-
ent teaching arrangements, namely, one in
discussion-task, one in personalizing-task and
the last one in clustering-task; they were all
assigned two written summary tasks, one in
English and the other in Persian. The result
highlighted the facilitating eflFect of the medi-
ating tasks in improving reading comprehen-
sion ofa source text.
Despite the above studies, other research
gave a negative answer to the effect of sum-
mary writing on reading ability. Crowhurst
(1991) did a quasi-experimental study on
persuasive discourse, and found no differenc-
es between groups on reading recall scores
through a 5-week writing experiment. Ban-
gert-Drowns and some scholars (2004) also
found that, in their 48 school-based writing-
 The Effect of Summary Writing on Reading Comprehension / 45
to-leam programs, writing has only a small,
positive impact on conventional measures of
academic achievement, although the use of
metacognitive prompts enhanced students'
academic achievements.
Mediation Theory and Summary Writing
Mediation Theory
It is \^gotsky who originally proposes
the children's high-order thinking develops
through mediating agents that interact with
the environment (Kozulin, 2003, p. 17). How-
ever, Feuerstein (Feuerstein at al, 1980) and
Lantoff (2000) are two following scholars
who developed the mediation theory into its
paramount. Ellis (2003) highlighted Lantoff's
thought: "the central and distinguishing con-
cept of sociocxiltural theory (the mediation
theory of learning) is that higher forms of
mental activity are mediated" (p. 175).
Vygotsky sees children's development in-
volves several types of mediators: material ob-
jects (e.g., textbooks), symbolic tools (e.g., lan-
guage), human beings (e.g., teachers or peers)
and oiganized activities (e.g., classroom tasks).
Mediators, in Ihe form of objects, symbols, and
persons, transform natural and spontaneous
imptdses into higher mental processes including
strategic orientations to problem solving (Dona-
to & MacCormick, 1994). Therefore, language
learning process can be viewed as a mediated
process involved with objects-, others-, and
self-regtilations. To this end, reading materials
can be regarded as the language mediators,
and summaiy writing as a task mediator that
helps language learners achieve self-regulation
(comprehension) through symbolic tools. Not
only does the task provide leaners with more
knowledge, but also it gets learners engaged in
constructing the text meaning and improving
their higher-order thinking.
Summary Writing in Reading Activity
While some research confirmed the effect
of summarization writing on reading, some
other relevant studies (Crowhurst, 1991) still
showed no significant influence from summa-
ry writing to readers' comprehension. Rea-
sons can also be explained from the mediation
theory: readers should be guided to select the
most appropriate types of mediators. For ex-
ample, for EFL learners at the intermediate
level, more mediators are necessary for their
English learning, and teachers should scaffold
these students witb their decision making in
choosing the appropriate sorts of mediators.
Therefore, in a students' task of summary
writing, teachers should first select the ap-
propriate reading materials for the students,
and make sure the texts are suitable not de-
manding for their students. This is consistent
with Krashen's "Input Hypothesis" (1979):
learners make progress in acquiring their lan-
guage knowledge when they comprehend the
language input that is slightly more advanced
than their current levels. If the reading text is
over-demanding for the readers and they even
have difficulties in comprehending the major-
ity of the words in the texts, they will proba-
bly fail to complete a reading summarization.
In addition, individual differences in the
executive functions of the writing process
may also affect one's composing process
(Graham, 1997; Singer & Bashir, 1999). For
example, even with the readable texts, lower
level students are in need of more scaffolding,
and teachers should offer these students more
mediators in their learning process. Emam
(2011) fully demonstrated that different me-
diators involved in students' task of summary
writing affect their performance differently.
In his study, the more mediators involved,
the better the students performed. Students
with clustering mediators, such as "webbing",
"word mapping", "semantic mapping", "vi-
sual brainstorming" and "clustering" tasks
outperformed the other groups. The finding
is also recognized by other scholars (Broukal,
2005; Brown, 2001; Nunan, 2003; Rodriguez,
2006), and thus recommended as an effec-
46 / Reading Improvement
tive reading comprehension and pre-writing
teaching/learning activity. Consequently, it
is suggested that teachers outline the sum-
mary framework or give some clues to their
students, for sake of students' better under-
standing on the texts. This is reasonable in the
mediation theory: objects-regulation (reading
texts) and self-regulation (summary writing)
should be interconnected with others-regula-
tion (teachers' scafFolding).
Conclusion
The paper analyzes the relevant studies
on the effect of summary writing on reading
comprehension. It confirms the positive efiFect
of summarization on readers* reading compre-
hension and explains the reasons from the per-
spective of mediation theory. The paper sheds
light on the pedagogical implications: first,
EFL reading instruction should involve more
writing tasks, which can better facilitate EFL
learners to summarize and comprehend what
they have read. Second, while ^propriate in-
volvement of mediators is necessary, tasks of
summary writing should be designed accord-
ing to EFL learners' individual differences.
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