A Case Study Of The Difficulties With Summary Writing Of English Underachievers At Senior High School

This study was carried out to explore the difficulties with summary writing of the two English underachievers at a senior high school from the four aspects:reading the specified material,extracting the major points,paraphrasing the topic sentence and using the connective words.The theoretical bases in this study were Input Hypothesis,Output Hypothesis and Attribution Theory.The significance of this study was to gain insight into the difficulties in summary writing so as to improve the English underachievers’ writing abilities and draw teachers’ attention to differentiation instruction so as to promote their professional development.The subjects in this study were two twelfth-graders at a senior high school,one boy and one girl.They were selected by purposive sampling.Their performances in English learning were unsatisfactory and they failed in the most of the English exams.The instruments of the study were a summary writing task and an interview schedule.A pilot interview was conducted to predict the problems that might be encountered in the interviews and to get familiar with the entire interview process.The two subjects were interviewed separately in the formal interviews and each lasted about an hour.The method of "summary writing+difficulty description" was used in the study.Each subject was given a summary writing task.After that,the researcher reviewed their summary and then asked them what difficulties they had in the four steps of summary writing.In order to make them relaxed and free to speak,the interviews were conducted in Chinese in a conversational style.With their permission,the researcher recorded the entire interviews,which were transcribed and translated.Data analysis included coding,categorization and summarization.The major findings were as the following:First,the difficulties in recognizing words and phrases and in understanding long and complex sentences were the main difficulties in reading,which might be due to their small vocabulary size,their limited phrases and their inadequate grammatical knowledge.Besides,the non-linguistic factors like their low self-efficacy and inappropriate reading strategies could also cause difficulties in vocabulary recognition and long and difficult sentences comprehension.Second,in terms of extracting,they had the difficulties in distinguishing major points from minor ones and distinguishing conclusive opinions from supporting details.The former might be due to their lack of reading comprehension ability and their Chinese way of thinking in analyzing the main sentences of the text,while the latter might be caused by their lack of genre awareness.Third,with regard to paraphrasing,there were two types of difficulties:the difficulty with lexical substitution and the difficulty with sentence transformation.The former was subdivided into the difficulty with the substitution of unknown words and the selection of synonyms;and the latter contained the difficulty with the transformation of the sentence pattern and with the maintenance of the original meaning.The former difficulties might be due to their limited vocabulary size and their lack of productive vocabulary;and the latter difficulties,to their lack of grammatical knowledge and reading comprehension ability.Fourth,as for the difficulties in using the connective words,they also had two types of difficulties:inadequate knowledge of how to use conjunctions correctly,and how to use conjunctions in various ways.One reason might be their lack of understanding of the usage of conjunctions;another,the negative transfer of their mother tongue;and the other,their lack of input of conjunctions.There were two limitations in this study.One was that the categorization of difficulties in the process of summary writing from the aspects of reading,extracting,paraphrasing and using was all made by the researcher herself,which might not totally avoid subjectivity.The other was that,there might be some overlapping in classifications of different difficulties;in other words,the boundaries that helped to differentiate various difficulties might be blurred.