1. ELD Rhetorical Approach
Write a Variety of Summaries
ELD Strategy Meeting Dec 4, 2012
Lisa Burgess, ELD DWAST TOSA
Source:

2. What Exactly is a Summary?
A summary is a long text distilled to its essentials, the key points worth noting, without examples and details.
The specific form, the sentence structure and the vocabulary, has been changed, but the main ideas remain.

3. Relevance
Writing a summary is an important skill that students will use throughout their academic careers.
Summarizing:
improves reading skills as students pick out the main ideas of a reading;
helps with vocabulary skills as students paraphrase a reading, altering the vocabulary and grammar as they do so;
improves critical thinking skills as students decide on the main ideas of the reading to include in the summary;
improves writing and editing skills as students draft and edit the summary;
helps with cooperative learning since students can also work with peers throughout the writing and revision process.

4. Summary Writing Problems
When told to summarize, students will often either copy verbatim, write long, detailed “summaries,” or write excessively short ones missing key information.
This occurs because students don’t really know what a summary is or how to write one.
If they have been told how to write one, it is usually in nonspecific terms, such as “Put the story in your own words.” This is not technical enough to be helpful. Summarizing is actually a specific and technical skill.

5. Steps to Teaching Summary

6. 1. As a class, read a short selection.
This can be either a short essay, article or part of one—also excerpts from a novel .
The text selection should be short enough that students can read it in the first part of your class session.
Chose within the ZPD for your ELD levels—and preread to identify possible problem
words or phrases.

7. Text Selection
Some suggestions are “short –short stories” or biographies of important people like Dr. Martin Luther King. Composition Practice and Milestones have short passages that can be read in order to summarize.
Other suggestions are short expository readings from the fields of science, education, or history.
Content area articles or chapter reviews read and summarized in ELD will help the student access the curriculum in the other classes.

8. 2. Determine the purpose for annotation and have students underline and annotate for that purpose as they read.
Explain the importance of annotating with a purpose: marking text as a study skill.
They can use this marked text as an outline to review later for quizzes.
The type of summary to be written determines the things that must be looked for and annotated in the text.

9. 3. Once students have their texts marked up, open the discussion of summaries.
Discuss what it is. Offer a vivid example of its importance: for example, “How long is the movie Titanic? Yes, over three hours. If someone asked you tell her about Titanic, would you talk for three hours? Of course not! What would you do?”
This gets students focused on the notion of summarizing as something they actually do in their everyday lives.

10. 4. Discuss the ideas.
At this point, discuss the ideas students underlined in their readings.
Call on students to share the main ideas they underlined and annotated and write them on the board.
It might be helpful at this point to instruct students to first do the reading and marking, and then close the reading, and without referring to it, tell their partner what it was about.
The partner can take notes on the retelling, and then they can compare it to the original, making adjustments, such as adding missed main points or deleting details.

11. 5. Provide an example.
The teacher might consider also handing out an example summary of something students have recently read—not the reading they are working on in this lesson—as a model of a summary.
A teacher-led summary for whole group can be modeled also.
The first time a new type of summary is introduced follow the Gradual Release Responsibility: We Do, You Do, I Do.

12. 7. Focus on main ideas
As a class, decide on the top 3-5 main ideas for the summary.
Look for the evidence to support those ideas in the text.
A rich and thorough discussion before writing will provide the support for a good summary.
The students need to chose one of the main ideas to summarize—not all five!

13. 8. Work on ordering the sentences and connecting them with transition words.
Since the main ideas are drawn from different sections of the text and distinct from each other, it is important to connect them.
This is a good time to teach some transition words of time or of addition.
When synthesizing two-three texts to write a summary around common theme, lead the students thru “stepping back” and seeing the big picture shared by all texts being summarized.

14. 9. Paraphrase the sentences
An important concept related to summarizing is changing the summary significantly from the original.
Model changing the grammar and vocabulary of the sentences, and have the student help with this as much as they can. This is a good way to help expand their vocabularies.
The teacher can refer back to the Titanic example at this point as needed: “Would you use the exact words as the film when describing it to your friend? Or would you use different words that mean about the same thing?”

15. 10. Teach the academic language of summaries.
At this point, the teacher might teach students some of the formulaic language of academic writing, such as the attributive tag phrases, i.e., “According to (the author),” to lead into the main idea and the summary.
Model sentence variety for : Source, Author, Title, Genre, Purpose, Audience (SATGPA) information.
Model and insist on proper citations!
Different genres of writing may have different types of summaries—a poem would address form and literary devices used whereas text taken from a website may have many types of visual aides, graphs, etc. which are used to make the authors claim.

16. GRR Give out another short reading selection.
Have students work on reading and marking the selection and then writing their summaries this time or in pairs.
Apply rubrics and use peer editing procedures so the students are prepared for independent summary writing.
Make it an expectation that every piece of text is summarized—practice repeating the skills with a variety of genres so students internalize the process and procedures for summarizing.

17. What Else Works?