Mikhnenko G.E.

National Technical University of Ukraine

„Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”

Using testing reading techniques for teaching writing summaries

Reading and writing are closely related processes that require active participation. Because writing about reading encourages critical thinking and deeper comprehension, it is important that learning activities reinforce the connection between these processes.

There are numerous textbooks with ideas and activities that teachers can use to teach reading and writing skills. One of these activities is writing a summary of the reading selections. Taking large quantities of information, understanding what that information means and condensing it into a shorter version of the original allows to have important information on hand for easy reference without having to memorize long passages. For whatever purpose, writing summaries is a task that many think easy but, in actuality, can be quite challenging, especially writing in a foreign language. The biggest problem with summary writing is deciding what to include and what to leave out, understanding the content properly, including major and minor sections.

So, developing and assessing reading skills can be considered as the first stage in teaching writing summaries. Aspects of readers that affect both the process and product of reading include the readers’ background and subject/topic knowledge, their cultural knowledge and their knowledge of the language in which the target texts are written. This linguistic knowledge includes phonological, orthographic, morphological, syntactic and semantic information, but it also includes discourse-level knowledge, including that of text organization and cohesion, text types and associated conventions, as well as metalinguistic knowledge. If reading is taking place in a foreign language, then linguistic knowledge includes that of the first language, and the relationship between the first and target languages at all linguistic levels.

The reader’s ability to process printed information is clearly crucial, indeed might be said to be the main object of any assessment procedure or test. Many books on language teaching assert that there is a significant difference between teaching techniques and testing techniques. However, J. Alderson [1] believes that this distinction is overstated, and that the design of a teaching exercise is in principle similar to the design of a test item. The point of making this statement is to encourage readers to see all exercises as potential test items also. The primary purpose of a teaching/learning task is to promote learning, while the primary purpose of an assessment task is to collect relevant information for purposes of making decisions about individuals – which is not to say that assessment tasks have no potential for promoting learning, but simply that this is not their primary purpose.

What techniques for testing reading can be considered not only as a tool for assessing reading but also as a means of teaching writing summaries? They can be the following:

· free-recall tests,

· summaries in the first language,

· multiple-choice summaries,

· gapped summary.

In free-recalls tests (sometimes called immediate-recall tests), students are asked to read a text, to put it to one side, and then to write down everything they can remember from the text. It might be objected that this is more a test of memory than of understanding, but if the task follows immediately on the reading, this need not be the case. This technique reveals information about how information is stored and organized, about retrieval strategies and about how readers reconstruct the text.

A more familiar variant of free-call technique, of course, is the summary, when the students need to understand the main idea of the text, to separate relevant from irrelevant ideas, to organize their thought about the text and so on. An obvious problem is that students may understand the text, but be unable to express their ideas in writing adequately, especially within the time available for the task. Therefore at the beginning stage of practicing students might be allowed to write the summary in their first language rather than the target language.

Good results at this stage can be obtained if students do multiple summary tasks, using the multiple-choice technique. The reader’s task is to select the best summary out of the answers on offer. This technique is also important as it provides students with different (both adequate and inadequate) examples of written summaries.

Another useful technique for both testing reading and teaching summary writing is the gapped summary. Students read a text, and then read a summary of the same text, from which key words have been removed. Their task is to restore the missing words, which can only be restored if students have read and understood the main ideas of the original text. It should, of course, not be possible to complete the gaps without having read the actual text. A further modification is to provide a bank of possible words and phrases to complete the gapped summary or to constrain responses to one or two words taken from the passage.

To sum up, we believe that using above-mentioned activities at the beginning stage of teaching summary writing, when students’ task is to understand the main ideas of texts, is essential. It will ensure further teaching writing concise accurate summaries in a foreign language.

References:

1. Alderson, J.C. Assessing reading. - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. – 358p.

2. Richards, J.C., Renandya, W.A. Methodology language teaching. - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. – 422p.