Summarizing Is a Skill: How Do I Teach It?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Not one of my students had their assignment. It was a 50-word summary of an article. They looked at each other, looked at me, and said, “We don’t know how to summarize.” This is not the first time we have done this assignment—it’s the 3rd or 4th.

“Okay. That’s good to know,” I said, taking a deep breath as I mentally trashed my whole lesson plan and began constructing a new one from scratch. 

The thing is, I believed the students. I don’t think they were just trying to get out of an assignment. Their previous summaries had always seemed a little weak—a collection of topic sentences straight from the article. I excused it with the thought that at least they knew what the purpose of a topic sentence was. I’d also noticed that when we did “dictogloss” activities if students couldn’t write the exact words, they left spaces blank, even if I encouraged them to at least put the idea in their own words. 

New lesson plan: “Let’s list 10 important words from the article.” (It’s not like they’re unfamiliar with the article. We’d read it together in class. We’d summarized it paragraph by paragraph. Um, yeah, maybe a lot of those summaries were really close if not identical to the topic sentence. They’d done well on a reading quiz and a vocabulary quiz. Seriously--I wrote my post last week on all the ways I was practicing active reading strategies with this article!) 

I listed the 10 words they volunteered on the whiteboard. Together, we came up with a couple of sentences linking those words around the content of the article, and I put them on the board. I asked whether there was anything important in the article that we’d missed. They said, “No.” We reviewed the article for content that wasn’t included in the summary on the whiteboard, and concluded that it was all good details and elaboration, but not essential. I erased the whiteboard and asked the students to write a summary like that. 

The results were mixed. Some were still pulling together topic sentences from the article. They do seem to understand a sentence at a time. Maybe that’s how they did well on the reading quiz. They found the sentence referenced and answered the question. Maybe they are holding a sentence at a time on their mental work bench, but no more.

I’ve got 2 weeks left in my school year to address this. It’s kind of exciting to have a pedagogical mystery to solve! I have a hypothesis: These advanced EFL middle schoolers can’t summarize because they don’t hold more than a sentence at a time on their mental work bench. Here are some of the things I'm going to try: 

• Summarizing exercise from Larry Ferlazzo’s book The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox. There are several simple paragraphs, each with 3 choices for a good summary: one is a quote of one of the sentences. One is just wrong. And one is the gist of the whole paragraph. I’m trying this on Monday.
• Simplifying text. I’ve been adjusting texts from Newsela to a lexile within the class range of students scores on TOEFL. For the last text of the year, I’ll dial that down to focus on summarizing. ("5 Easy Ways to Teach Summarizing Skills" emphasizes starting with simple texts where comprehension is not an issue)
• A plan in reserve: Find 5 main ideas. Paraphrase. Add transition. (Stacia Levy. “Less Is More? How to Teach Summary Writing,” Busy Teacher)

That will be about all I have time for this year. But that introduction to “Less Is More” got me: “Teachers at times tend to believe that summary writing is easy, and students should be able to do it without being taught; teachers will sometimes make an assignment to “read and summarize the article,” for example, without much direction.” Guilty as charged. I’ll do some experiments at the end of this year, and start next year differently.

How about you? What are your great ideas for teaching students how to summarize?