Action Research On The Cultivation Of The Ability To Summarize In English Discourse Reading Of Middle School Students

Faced with the massive amount of information and fragmented content in the era of information explosion,students need to be able to extract key information through reading,discover general features and correlations of things.This essential thinking process in daily life is summarization.Students’ summarizing ability,as a fundamental thinking ability,relies on reading to cultivate it.At present,there have been many studies on summary writing in the high school English subject in China’s language teaching research,and there are also many explorations in summary teaching in the high school Chinese subject.However,during the critical period of students’ development of abstract logical thinking in middle school,there is still a significant gap in summary teaching,especially in English teaching.Through questionnaire surveys and interviews,this study analyzed the current situation,teaching foundation,and existing problems of summary teaching in middle school English teaching.Teachers lack a strong awareness of teaching discourse as an organic whole,and invest too much energy in fragmented vocabulary and grammar;Teaching reflects that students have a preliminary understanding of summarizing,but their summarizing ability is weak and they often lose points in the types of summarizing questions;Daily training has not received the necessary attention.Reading training is mainly focused on multiple-choice questions,and students rarely receive specialized training in summarizing.On the basis of investigation and literature review,this study takes students from a middle school in C city as the research object,following a cycle of planning,action,observation,and reflection,and designs and implements three rounds of action research.The first round of action research mainly explores which summary skills should be taught and how to conduct summary skills teaching.Through teaching implementation,classroom observation,and teaching reflection,research has found that the "lecture style" teaching that focuses on summarizing skills has problems such as difficulty for students to understand,inability to establish an overall impression,and fragmented teaching content.During implementation,researchers quickly adjusted the teaching mode to allow students to learn summarizing skills in specific discourse.The results showed a significant increase in student participation,but it was still difficult to master the summary method.The investigation and analysis found that the dilemma for students lies in their inability to form discourse structures.In the first round of action reflection,researchers refer to relevant literature,analyze the characteristics of discourse types,propose structured rules,and help students form an overall understanding of the text by grasping the structure of the text.Based on this,they learn to summarize.In the second round of action research,researchers further explored the cultivation of summarizing ability in different types of discourse reading,allowing students to structure and meaning based on discourse characteristics.Research has found that social life discourse can be summarized based on "5W1H" in teaching,and biographies can be summarized based on timelines;Story texts can be summarized based on the story mountain;Explanatory discourse can be summarized based on the structure of the explanatory text.After the second round of research,students’ classroom participation and summary writing skills have significantly improved.In the third round of action research,the researchers further integrated the teaching mode formed in the second round of research and validated the effectiveness of the teaching mode through the design of control and experimental classes.Among them,Class B,as an experimental class,focuses on strengthening the overall and structured reading teaching,and strengthening the specific demonstration of summary writing.Class A,as the control class,independently summarized three articles.Research has found that students in Class B,who previously had weaker foundations,have significantly improved their grades after receiving reading summary teaching training,reaching and slightly surpassing the level of Class A.Class A maintained its summary scores at the same level as in the second round without the teacher’s specific summary teaching guidance.The results of the three rounds of action research indicate that summary teaching plays a positive role in promoting and developing students’ summary ability.The study confirms that the effectiveness of reading summary teaching is better based on discourse.According to different discourse types,different summarizing strategies have been formed and the teaching effect is significant.The significant improvement of students’ summarizing ability can also enhance their self-efficacy and transfer to other disciplines.Based on the analysis and comparison of teaching processes and their effects,the paper explores the key factors and cognitive mechanisms that contribute to the effective teaching of reading summarization.Activate students’ content schemata through pre reading activities such as prediction,analyze discourse structure to help students form structural schemata,and use summary strategies such as topic sentences and word summaries to achieve content summarization and language conversion,forming language schemata.The level of English discourse summarization is measured from five aspects: completeness,correctness,conciseness,coherence,and synonymous conversion.Based on relevant research findings and discussions,this study proposes a series of recommendations for teaching practice.Firstly,conducting summary teaching based on discourse;Secondly,by summarizing,establish structured knowledge and form a schema;Thirdly,attention should be paid to developing students’ cognitive and metacognitive strategies in teaching;Fourthly,through reasonable teaching,develop students’ thinking abilities and achieve the goal of reducing burden and increasing efficiency;Fifth,help students form internal motivation and promote mental health.The findings of this study on the factors,mechanisms,and models of summary teaching contribute to promoting understanding of the cultivation of middle school students’ summarizing ability and enhancing the practice of middle school English summary teaching.