Examining Chinese Doctoral Students' Performance In Summary Writing

Recent decades have witnessed a grow:ing body of literature discussing students'performance in summary writing.The importance of summary writing in the field of writing for academic purposes has begun to resurface.As a preliminary attempt to examine Chinese doctoral students' performance in summary writing,this thesis probes into their ability to summarize the gist from the original text and their dependence on the original text to construct summaries.Four features were analyzed separately:thesis statement,accurate idea coverage,exact copy and minor revision.In the study,60 written summaries by doctoral students in English for Academic Communication courses offered at Nanjing University were collected and submitted to quantitative and qualitative analysis by means of manual identification and classification.The results yielded the following findings:1.Most Chinese doctoral students are incapable of summarizing the gist from the original text.For one thing,only 25%of the students under study could compose an appropriate thesis statement.This seems to show that whereas Chinese doctoral students have the awareness to construct a thesis statement in their summaries,most of them cannot do it properly.This may be explained by students' tendency to focus on the first sentence or the first few paragraphs rather than go through the whole text to construct a global thesis statement.For another,accurate idea coverage was only 23.54%in the present study.This may show that Chinese doctoral students only include few accurate idea units in their summaries,indicating that most of them have difficulty in identifying and conveying the major points of the original text.The low percentage of accurate idea coverage may be attributable to the fact that students tend to limit the location where they can find the main ideas to two places:a)an early paragraph or early sentence of one paragraph which introduces the topic the author plans to discuss,and b)a concluding paragraph or last sentence of one paragraph which contains the author's thesis.2.As regards language use,Chinese doctoral students seem to depend heavily on the source text to construct their own summaries.Over 8 occurrences of textual borrowing occurred in each student's written summary.For one thing,exact copy appeared to be overused by students compared with proficient native writers,extending the group of overusing exact copy to the postgraduate level.This suggests that Chinese doctoral students should be aware of reducing exact copy use.For another,minor revision accounted for the large part of the whole textual borrowing strategies(59.18%in the present study),indicating that Chinese doctoral students rely on original source text involving word-level changes rather than more global modifications.These findings confirm that Chinese doctoral students indeed may face challenges when doing summary writings.First,they may encounter difficulty in identifying and conveying the central idea and main ideas of the source text.Second,they tend to use more exact copy than necessary and use only word-level change to the source text languages.Pedagogical implications are put forward for both learners and teachers in academic writing.First,students must be aware of the importance of summary writing,expand their understanding of the location of important ideas,adopt the proper attitudes towards exact copy use and improve their summary writing skills.Second,teachers should include some activities that foster summary writing skills intheir lessons,watch out students' use of direct copy and lead students smoothly from exact copy or word-level modification to extensive reformulation of source texts.