These thoughts come from reading an article comparing summarization skills in L1 and L2:
Yu, G. (2008). Reading to summarize in English and Chinese: A tale of two languages? Language Testing 25 (4), 521-551.
- Reading comprehension is accepted as a prerequisite skill to summarization (pp. 521-522)
- Summary skills can be used to improve reading ability (p. 522)
- Summarization ability is necessary for academic succes (p. 522)
- Is summarization a reading skill or a writing skill, or both. Perhaps neither, it’s a hybrid subskill (p. 522)
- There has been a recent revival in integrated reading-writing tasks (p. 523)
- Summarization skills are more complex and seperate from basic reading skills (p. 524)
- Students with weaker overall proficiency were more likely to do verbatim copying (p. 525)
- Students who copied claimed that it was easier since they did not have to understand the meaning of the words/phrases (p. 542, 544-545)
- Problem-solving strategy use was more common among better summarizers (p. 526)
- L2 summaries tend to be of poorer quality than L1 summaries, have less important information, and have more false information (p. 527)
- Although general reading comprehension scores slightly relate to summary writing scores, there is still a great deal of difference between the skills (p. 536, 544)
- General comprehension reading skills may be very different from the reading skills needed for summaries, and other skills or factors may be involved in summarization ability (p. 544)
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