Summarization Skills of

Engineering Students
Reading in a Second Language

Ivana Mirović
Branislava Ličen
Vesna Bogdanović
Summarization
 extracting main ideas from the text and
condensing the text to its gist

 closely related to text comprehension

 can serve as an indication of text comprehension

 quality of summary usually depends on text

comprehension
Model of Text Processing

Kintsch and van Dijk – information processing model

highest levels (macropropositions): topic/ theme

lowest levels: letters and words

Successful text processing: integration of bottom-up and

top-down approaches
Summarization in the First Language
Six rules for summarizing a text (Brown and Day):

1. deletion of unnecessary material

2. deletion of redundancy

3. substitution of a super ordinate term for a list of items

4. use of a super ordinate term for a list of actions

5. selection of a topic sentence provided in the text

6. invention of a topic sentence if it does not appear

explicitly in the text
Summarization in the Foreign /
Second Language

 Kozimsky and Graetz, Johns and Mayers, Corberil and

others
 the influence of L2 proficiency
 types of strategies used
 level of text processing
Our Study

 Subjects: 28 students of electrical engineering

 Text: an article from The Telegraph (the online version of
The Daily Telegraph); 687 words and 15 paragraphs

 Focus: - awareness of task demands

- use of summarization strategies
Awareness of Task Demands

 results contrary to our initial assumption

However:
 4 summaries with new titles
 personal comments (25%) e.g.

 I thinkthis new method of extracting energy from

water flow is a good way of providing energy for the
future;
 or: … we can wait to see what is going to happen
with this, I can say, important project
Summarization Strategies

The six rules for summarizing a text (Brown and Day)

slightly modified and simplified for practical purposes

1) verbatim copying
2) reordering of ideas and paragraphs from the text
3) integration of ideas
4) the presence of global statement about the text
Summarization Strategies
Copy / delete strategy

 the most widely adopted approach

 5 students had 0% copying
 5 students had over 50% of text verbatim copied
Summarization Strategies
Use of copy / delete strategy

80-100%
60-80%
40-60%
20-40%
0-20%
Summarization Strategies
Copy / delete strategy

Brown and Day:

 copy / delete strategy partially adequate

 produces an abbreviated version of a text that can be

accepted as a summary
 can actually impede progress towards more mature

strategies
Summarization Strategies
Reordering of ideas

 the majority of students (21) did not use this at all

 10 instances of reordering, some students used this
strategy more than once
 reordering generally related to little or no copying (one
exception, S16).
 Summarization Strategies
Copying and Reordering
(first half of the Table)

Reordering 0 0 2 0 2 0 0 2 1 0 0 1 1 0
of ideas

Copy / 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 5% 5% 5% 5% 5% 10% 10% 10% 10%

Delete

Students S13 S14 S24 S25 S27 S6 S8 S22 S23 S26 S4 S9 S15 S20
Summarization Strategies
Integration of ideas

 found exactly 28 times but not distributed evenly among

the students
 some students used this strategy two or three times
 eight students did not use it at all
 inversely proportional to the amount of copying
 explanation can be linked to language proficiency and
not necessarily to problems in text comprehension
Summarization Strategies
Global statement

 eight instances of global statement

 cannot be linked to any particular group of students or
the use any particular summary strategy
 Brown and Day: expert summarizers organized their
summaries around the topic sentences
 global statement found most often in the summaries was
rather general (e.g., This text is about new and nature
friendly technology and it seems it’s not science fiction.)
Conclusion

 Students generally aware of task demands

 Developmental trends in applying summarization
strategies
 Partially adequate copy / delete strategy related to other
attributes of surface processing
 Relation between language proficiency and better
summarization skills needs to be studied further