Native and non-native speakers of English in summarising expository texts

This study examines how native and non-native English speakers summarise expository texts. It investigates if there is any difference in quality between the summaries produced by two groups of students; namely native speakers of English, who acquire the language in early childhood and have their education (from kindergarten / grade 1 to high school) in English, and non-native speakers, who acquire the language in an ESL/EFL context. The sample consisted of seventy undergraduates from a private Malaysian university, comprising thirty-five native and thirty-five non-native speakers of English. Data for the study include summaries by students, response to teacher and student questionnaires as well as interviews with both teachers and students. The results of the study revealed that there was a significant difference in the quality of summaries of native and non-native English speakers in expository text

Use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies in summarizing expository text by ESL undergraduates / Shariat Taheri Moghaddam

The purpose of this study was to examine how the ESL undergraduates shifted between the metacognitive and cognitive strategies when they summarized an expository text. It also investigated the metacognitive and cognitive strategies of summarizing the expository text among ESL undergraduates. The sample consisted of five ESL undergraduates from a Malaysian public university. The source of data included the participants’ think aloud protocols, semi-structured interview, the original summary scripts and the learners’ summary drafts. The type of source material for summarizing was an expository text. The theoretical framework of this study was built based on two models of summarizing. The Kintsch and van Dijk model (1978) was used in order to describe the different steps of summarizing by ESL undergraduates while they are summarizing the expository text. Likewise, Sarig’s recursive-corrective summary processes model (1993) was applied to identify the metacognitive and cognitive strategies which ESL undergraduates used in summarizing the expository text and also their shifts between these strategies. The results of the study revealed that there was an interactive, dynamic and recursive relationship between the undergraduates’ metacognitive and cognitive strategies. Furthermore, the recursive-interactive summarizing processing model was developed based on the interactions between the participants’ shifts between the metacognitive and the cognitive strategies. The relationship of the metacognitive and cognitive strategies was presented. The data also presented “planning” and “assessing” as the main categories of metacognitive strategies and “operating” as the main category of cognitive strategies which the participants used in summarizing the expository text. Each main category was divided into different sub-categories. Moreover, the steps of summarizing in the current study were almost the same as the three macro-structures or steps suggested by Kintsch and van Dijk (1978): “selection”, “generalization” and “construction”. In other words, the undergraduates read the original material, comprehended the text and selected the main ideas in the reading part and wrote their drafts and revised them in the writing part of summarizing the expository text. This study is beneficial for students in order to be aware of summarizing skills and use them in their lessons, for teachers in order to be able to teach the strategies in the classes and for the education system and syllabus designers in order to include the metacognitive and cognitive strategies in their academic texts