Effects Of Source Textual Characteristics On Task Difficulty In Summary Writing Test

This research aims at exploring the correlations between text characteristics and the difficulty of summary writing tasks,as well as exploring the nature and extents of these effects.Meanwhile,this research also studies the effects of text characteristics on summary writing strategies.This research is a deductive research supported by quantitative data and qualitative data.“Text Complexity”,“Text Clues”,“Topic Familiarity” and “Text Length” are chosen as the targets of this research,and students of moderate English proficiency as the subjects.Quantitative data are the scores of subjects’ summary works,which are based on the source texts of different characteristics.These are analyzed by methods like stepwise regression and bivariate correlation.Qualitative data come from questionnaires and interviews.These two kinds of data work together to explore the effects of text characteristics on the difficulty of summary writing tasks.The results indicate that these four text characteristics have several effects on the difficulty of the summary writing tasks.Text complexity can affect the process of understanding more than the process of summarizing.High text complexity can make it difficult to summarize main idea and to arrange the information in accordance with the source text.Familiarity with the topic encourages subjects to write “in their own words”.The relation between text length and summary length is an inverted U shape one.While text clues are not as helpful as assumed.Moreover,the results also suggest that subjects seldom adjust their strategies in accordance the variances in source texts,Given that researches on the task difficulty of summary writing,as a test item,among L2 learners in China is relatively new area,this research does certain exploration and provide possible directions for future research.