Improving advanced reading comprehension in a foreign language: summaries vs. short‐answer questions

Summarizing appears to be an activity well suited to sensitizing advanced foreign language readers to the inner workings of a text and weaning them away from word-to-word decoding. Indeed, recent research has emphasized the importance of summarizing as an aid to reading comprehension (Cohen, 1987; Bernhardt, 1986; Brown et al., 1981). We were interested in using summary writing as a tool in promoting reading comprehension and hypothesized that students who gained practice in extracting the main points of a text would become more effective readers. The main purpose of the study was to determine whether the comprehension of students who were trained to summarize improved more than that of students who responded to short-answer questions. The researchers, who teach EFL (English as a foreign language) at Haifa University, taught 6 classes totalling 179 students. Three classes summarized 10 academic texts of general interest, while the other three classes answered short-answer questions on the same texts. At the same time we collected information on the students’ background in order to identify possible non-linguistic factors that may affect reading comprehension. Since the reading comprehension of all the classes improved significantly, it was not possible to say that either summarizing or the answering of questions was a major cause of this improvement. However, results suggest that writing summaries helped students read more efficiently. Results of MANOVA pointed to the conjoint effects of three factors: task (summary vs. short-answer questions), gender (male vs. female), and native language (Hebrew vs. Arabic). Perhaps the most interesting finding is that classroom discussion in which students negotiated the scoring key of both summaries and responses to short-answer questions (after handing in assignments) proved to be extremely valuable. This negotiation motivated students to become intensely involved with the text and more critical of their own responses. RESUME Lire et resumer des textes en langue etrangere On a demandea des etudiants d'universite de lire des textes anglais appartenant a leur domaine de specialisation. En cours de lecture, generalement, les etudiants resument et retirent l'information essentielle des textes. Des recherches recentes ont montre que la comprehension de la lecture se developpe par la pratique du resume, mais qu'il est plus difficile de resumer des textes ecrits dans une langue etrangere que dans sa propre langue. On a effectue une etude preliminaire pour examiner l'effet du resume sur la comprehension de la lecture. Les chercheurs, enseignants d'anglais comme langue etrangtrea l'Universite de Haifa, ont enseignea 6 classes, soit un total de 179 etudiants. Le groupe experimental de 3 classes a resume 10 textes, tandis que le groupe temoin de 3 classes, a repondu a des questions a reponse courte portant sur les memes textes. Il a ete repondu, en hebreu et en anglais, a un pre-test et a un post-test consistant en un resume et en questions a reponse courte. Les chercheurs ont evalue les resumes apres discussion avec les etudiants. Puisque la comprehension de la lecture a augmente significativement dans toutes les classes, il n'a pas ete possible de dire que le fait de resumer est une cause majeure de cette amelioration. Toutefois, les resultats indiquent qu'il existe une tendance a ce que les etudiants ay ant eu a resumer obtiennent des niveaux plus eleves a l'examen final et a la fin du cours. Le sexe et l′appartenance ethnique se sont reveles etre egalement des facteurs significatifs. Par consequent, des facteurs sociolinguistiques aussi bien que des facteurs discursifs et psycholinguistiques, se revelent avoir un effet sur la comprehension de la lecture.