Summary Writing as a Tool for Improving the Comprehension of Expository Texts: An Intervention Study in a Primary School

The relationship between summarization and text comprehension is particularly relevant from an instructional perspective. The ability to summarize a text adequately in either oral or written form is a basic tool to assess student comprehension and a learning strategy. The difficulty that children experience with writing adequate summaries has primarily three reasons, which pertain to the reading and writing activities involved in summarization: the complexity of expository texts, which are the typical genre of materials that are to be studied and summarized, the strategies and cognitive processes to be used during summarization, and the specificity of summaries as a writing genre. This chapter focuses on using summaries as a learning strategy. Specifically, it analyzes the effects of writing a summary on expository text comprehension. The chapter analyzes the effects of summary instruction on the expository text comprehension of fourth graders. Keywords: cognitive process; instructional perspective; learning strategy; summarization; text comprehension; writing genre