An investigation on how Brazilian university-level students produce written summaries of an expository text in L2

Abstract

Ideally, readers build meaningful and coherent mental representations of the texts they read (Kintsch; van Dijk, 1978; van Dijk; Kintsch, 1983; Gagné et al., 1993), and they are able to express such mental representations in summaries and recall protocols. Furthermore, strategic readers approach a text keeping in mind the reading situation, i.e., reading purposes and text type, while monitoring their comprehension (Carrell, 1989; 1998; Paris; Lipson; Wixson, 1983; Paris; Wasik; Turner, 1991). The present study aims at investigating to what extent eight Brazilian university-level students are strategic when producing written summaries of an expository text in English as L2. Participants took part in a workshop on how to produce summaries from expository texts in English and their production was collected and analyzed in terms of how strategic they were in displaying controlling, central and secondary ideas. Participants were proficient and strategic readers in both L1 and L2 (Portuguese and English, respectively), and were knowledgeable of academic genres. Therefore, it was hypothesized that they would be able to construct a meaningful and coherent representation of the text, while monitoring their reading comprehension, which, in turn, was expected to be reflected in their production of summaries. Results revealed that the majority of the participants were strategic when approaching the text and could build a coherent mental representation of it, while some of the participants omitted some central and secondary ideas.