Investigating the Summary Writing Performance of University Students in Taiwan

This paper reports the initial findings of an ongoing investigation into the summary writing performance of university students in Taiwan. Forty-six students at the high-intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency participated in this study, in which they were asked to read two argumentative English texts and write a summary in English for each source text. Frameworks from Friend (2001), Rivard (2001), and Yu (2007) were adapted for data analysis. The 92 summaries were analyzed for the number and types of text propositions covered (i.e., main ideas, extraneous ideas and inaccurate statements) and then evaluated for the quality of writing (i.e., paraphrase and integration of ideas, rhetorical features, and language control). The performance data were triangulated with data obtained from post-task questionnaires and follow-up interviews. The results showed that the high-intermediate level students, compared to their advanced-level counterparts, included fewer main ideas and more extraneous ideas in their summaries. The former group also appeared to be more constrained by lexical and grammatical deficiencies than the latter group did while writing summaries, resulting in more frequent use of verbatim replication and greater difficulty in reformulating and integrating ideas. Both groups needed more training on how to rearrange and reorganize the ideas extracted from a source text to compose a coherent summary text with adequate rhetorical fluency. The paper concludes with suggestions for teaching and further research.