How to Teach Summary Writing?

Writing summaries is a very useful ability, but it can be challenging to teach new students. It’s possible that young children or ESL students won’t understand the purpose of summaries or will find it difficult to simply express themselves in class.

With a little time, patience, and repetition, students can go through this summary process and learn a lot. For your convenience, this article has been divided into 3 parts.

1. To begin your class, define a summary.

Give a clear explanation of a summary at the outset to prevent confusion among the pupils.

Include your learning objectives and goals for the session on summary writing. Reduce the pupils’ stress and worry about the summary writing process. Think about how you felt the first time you were required to write a summary in high school.

Give students practical tips for creating summaries and enhancing their general writing abilities.

When demonstrating the fundamentals of summarising, a projector, PowerPoint, or another visual tool may be helpful.

2. What Are Some Ways You Can Teach Your Students to Summarize?

Cut the headlines of newspaper stories. Have children practice writing headlines for (or matching the severed headlines to) the “headless” articles.

Select a single newspaper story, and instruct the students to simply identify the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How using the keywords or phrases.

Ask the learners to read the reading text on a piece of paper that you have provided to them.

After finishing the material, instruct students to flip the sheet over and try to summarize the main points of the text in a paragraph.

To ensure that they have understood the key points of the book, have students repeatedly switch back and forth between the summary they wrote and the reading text.

Encourage students to create progressively shorter summaries, continually editing and condensing their writing until only the most crucial and pertinent details remain.

Encourage them to begin with a page and work their way down to two paragraphs, one paragraph, two or three sentences, and finally one sentence.

3. Encourage your class to underline any key phrases or concepts.

Encourage your students to highlight or underline any significant details that contribute to the overall description of the piece as you read.

Show how to add asterisks (*) to the phrases or sentences that can serve as the summary’s key argument.

Encourage students to thoroughly study the material, paying close attention to the stylistic, textual, and thematic messages the author is trying to get through.

4. Once students have annotated their materials, start a conversation about summaries.

Talk about what they are. Give a precise illustration of their significance, such as “How long is the movie “Titanic”? three-plus hours. Would you talk for three hours if someone asked you to tell her about the movie? Obviously not! How would you respond? Students become more focused on the idea that summarizing is something they actually do in their daily lives as a result of this.

5. The next step should be a discussion of the points marked.

At this stage, discuss the concepts that the students underlined in their readings. Invite the kids to discuss the key points they underlined and add them to the board. Even points can be used for these.

6. Give an example

In addition to the reading assignment for this lesson, the instructor may choose to give out a sample summary of something that the students have recently read.

7. Work on arranging the sentences and adding transitional phrases to link them.

It’s critical to link the primary concepts together because they are diverse from one another and taken from various parts of the text. Teaching some time or additional transition words at this time is an excellent idea.

8. Defining the sentences.

The idea of drastically altering the summary from the original is crucial in the context of summarizing. Practice modifying the sentences’ grammar and vocabulary, and enlist as much assistance from the kids as you can. Their vocabularies can be expanded by doing this.

9. Teach students how to write summaries

The teacher may now instruct the class in some of the formulaic language used in academic writing, such as the use of the phrase “according to (the author),” which introduces the main idea and summary.

10. In a Nutshell

You should ask your students to pretend they are placing an advertisement in the classifieds or sending a telegram, where each word costs them money. Depending on the text they are summarizing, you can choose how much time they have to spend on it and, consequently, how long the summary should be.

Conclusion:

Teachers will discover that if they follow the advice in this article on how to teach summary writing skills, students will be more than willing to crank out summary after summary on pretty much any subject you offer them.