A Study Of The Development Of Chinese EFL Learners' Summary Writing Performance For Academic Purpose

Summary writing is one of the most important abilities in academic writing.Summary writing has been regarded as an integrative task that involves the interplay of two abilities:the ability to understand the main ideas and rhetorical organization of a text and the ability to compose a succinct and coherent restatement of the author's gist.Research also suggested that summary tasks can facilitate the holistic development of learners' English reading and writing ability.In the field of English for academic purposes,summary writing not only integrates the reading ability and the writing ability,it also requires the interaction between reading and writing.Students need to read the original text first,distinguish the main ideas from the extraneous ideas,decide the organization of the passage,and then restate the content in a logical and cohesive way.In this process,many skills are needed to guarantee a successful composition.If there is any weak link in the whole process,a potential failure in the summary production is likely to be predicted.This study focused on the development of Chinese EFL learners' summary writing performance for academic purpose.Academically,the restraints are stricter on behaviors such as text borrowing,paraphrasing,and citing.Reading comprehension,language conciseness,passage structures,and language expressions all should follow requirements of academic writing standards.Limited by such requirements,studies from the perspective of the effect of source text are relatively rare.Based on Krashen's input hypothesis,Swain' s output hypothesis,and Long's interaction hypothesis,the summaries were analyzed and evaluated from two aspects:comparison of participants in two groups and comparison of a participant's performance between two years.The summary writing behavior was examined from text length,verbatim uses of source text,orientations to source evidence,and argument structure.Fifty-two undergraduate English majors from Shandong University participated in this experiment.These participants were divided into two groups.Group One was composed of twenty-eight freshmen and Group Two was composed of twenty-four juniors.In December 2014,a writing task was assigned to both groups and forty-eight summaries were collected.In November and December 2015,the same writing task was assigned again and forty-two summaries were collected.Through comparing the differences in summary writing performance of Group One and Group Two,Group One(with higher language proficiency)had better performance than Group Two(with lower language proficiency).Between both groups,the verbatim use rate of the original text of G2 was lower and G2 students had better grasp of the main evidence of the source text.These participants could better summarize the meaning and condense their expressions.Participants in G2 tended to use more paraphrasing and summarizing skills.However,there was no obvious difference in argument structure between both groups.In both groups,the performance in 2015 was better than that in 2014,especially the overall performance of G2.Participants in G2 added more words in their summaries with less dependence on the original text.They were more capable of processing and expressing the received information.In 2015,due to negative emotion to the repeated writing task,participants in G1 unwillingly finished the task with fewer words and higher rate of copying.However,a year's training on passage structure contributed to their improvement on argument structure.Theoretically,the present study tries to explain the significance of Input hypothesis,Output Hypothesis,and Interaction Hypothesis on summary writing.Empirically,the present study attempts to enrich summary writing experiments and clarify the current situation of Chinese EFL learners' summary writing situation.Pedagogically,the present study expects to discover the influence of source text on summary writing,and offer some suggestions for EFL teachers.