| This study investigated how different dimensions of English lexical proficiency contributed to the processes and quality of English summary writing among 68 Japanese undergraduate EFL (English as a foreign language) students. I assessed individually their English summary writing performance with two different writing topics in respect to four dimensions of their English lexical proficiency (vocabulary size, depth of vocabulary knowledge, word-definition ability, and lexical diversity in writing), English reading comprehension, communicative English abilities, and lexical knowledge and writing ability in Japanese. I conducted stimulated-recall interviews with each student immediately after the two summary writing tasks then identified the types of metacognitive strategies the students reported using. I analyzed their summaries from four perspectives: overall quality, inclusion of key ideas, uses of source information, and the extent of copying from the source text. I further conducted textual analyses of 10 more and less effective summaries in terms of lexical repetition links and topical structures.;Discriminant analysis revealed that the difference between two groups of students with different English abilities (n = 33 for each group) was more strongly associated with their productive English abilities (summary writing performance, degree of verbatim copying, and word-definition ability) than with their receptive abilities (choosing key ideas, reading comprehension, receptive English vocabulary knowledge). Partial correlation and ordinal regression analyses showed that the two strongest predictors of the students' English summary writing performance were their reading comprehension and word-definition ability. More effective writers tended to be more aware of the macro-structure of their summaries while summarizing, transformed and paraphrased source texts more often, and borrowed source sentences less frequently than did less effective writers. Based on these results, I emphasize the significance of writing aspects of summarizing for these EFL students, and discuss how their uses of metalinguistic knowledge about words created coherence in their summaries. I suggest implications for second-language writing instruction, theories of vocabulary knowledge and use, and English education in EFL contexts such as Japan. |
