A Study On College English Learner' Summary Writing Under The Pedagogical Interventions Of Concept Mapping

Since the 1980s, with the development of writing across the curriculum and writing in the discipline movements, academic writing has been highlighted in western education. Summary writing as one of the most typical academic writing forms attracts scholars' considerable attention. Recently, a fair number of large-scale tests (e.g., the Entrance Examination of Guang Dong, TEM-4 and the Examination for Engineering Master) have taken summarization as a task of writing evaluation. This study explores college students' summary writing under the pedagogical interventions of concept mapping (CM), attempting to investigate the effects of CM on summary writing and students'attitudes toward this prewriting strategy via observing and analyzing students'writing productions and reflective logs, which would provide conductive suggestions for college English writing pedagogy.In this study, a scaffold fading CM method is designed as a pedagogical intervention. With quantitative and qualitative analysis, pretest and posttest scores collected in one semester are statistically processed by software SPSS 19.0. Meanwhile, the processes of summary writing, map constructing as well as students'reflections are closely traced. In addition, interviews are also conducted to explore students'cognition and evaluative attitudes to CM.Results show that students'writing performance is significantly improved in terms of content, organization and genre while there are no statistical enhancements in vocabulary and language use aspects. Besides, statistic analysis also indicates a positive correlation between the quality of constructed concept maps and writing scores. The interview results and reflective logs give supportive evidence that CM has a positive influence on students' reflective behaviors and most of the students involved in this study take a positive attitude to this new prewriting strategy. They make a transitional focus from vocabulary and syntax to content integration, discourse structure, genre conventions and academic words. However, factors such as learning motivation, original writing habits and English proficiency levels are likely to result in the inadaptability of students to CM. The findings of the research have important implications for the exploration of pedagogical models of English writing.