Enhancing High School Students’ Summarization Skill Through Concept Mapping

Summarizing text is one of the most effective comprehension strategies and an effective way to learn from text.In addition,many researches illustrate that the explicit instruction of such strategies is critical to developing skilled readers.Despite such evidence,relatively few studies focus on discussing the development of summarization skill in a classroom teaching context.And among those studies on summarization,many concern summarization in L1 whereas few explore summarization in English as a foreign language.This study,through experiment and interview,investigated and compared the effects of two strategies that help Chinese high school students to summarize texts in English,that is,the traditional rule-governed strategy based on discourse analysis(Kintsch & van Dijk,1978)and concept mapping(Novak & Gowin,1984)strategy.This study is meant to cast light on the teaching and learning of summarization strategy.Senior three high school students from city center of Shanghai were randomly assigned to the experiment group to learn concept mapping strategy or the control group to learn rule-governed strategy and then were pre-tested on their ability to compose written summaries.One week after four sessions of explicit strategy instruction in both groups,students took a post-test to evaluate their summary writing.Performance on identification of main idea,important points and necessary elaboration was analyzed using independent samples t-test for quantitative data analysis.And as qualitative data,written summaries in pretest and posttest,interview notes of students from both groups were analyzed to account for the differences in performance.As it turned out,students in the experiment group scored statistically higher in terms of identifying important information and in representing the original text structure than students in the control group.This research indicates that explicit instruction in concept mapping as a pre-writing task can enhance high school students’ summarization performance by reducing strategic difficulty of summarization and making classroom learning more reflective and collaborative.