engleski

Why teach summary writing

The ability to summarize is an important and useful skill in any process of learning. It is a precondition for developing other useful skills, such as critical thinking, for example, which plays an important role in all the eight key competencies for lifelong learning, as defined by the EU Reference Framework. It is, therefore, a skill that students will need both throughout their academic and professional careers. Summarizing helps share information quickly. All kinds of content are summarized in different contexts in order to achieve efficiency. Depending on the requirements of the situation, summaries can vary in length, but the bottom line is always to identify the main points of the original and produce its abbreviated version. Teaching summary writing at the tertiary level of education is useful because it not only helps learners improve their general language skills, but also develops their comprehension skills. Comprehension/understanding is one of the six categories of the cognitive domain in Bloom’s taxonomy and the ability to summarize is one of the key activities and learning outcomes connected to this domain. When summarizing, it is essential to comprehend the text fully which implies other key activities – paraphrasing, distinguishing and rewriting. It is at this point that the learner’s capacity for critical thinking is activated. The paper offers some examples of how writing summaries can be integrated into foreign language classes at the tertiary level of education.

comprehension skills, foreign language classes, learning outcomes, summarizing

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