Characteristics of Korean High School Students’ Summary Writing of English Reading Texts

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the characteristics of Korean high school students’ summary writing of the English texts they have read. For that aim the study analyzes the summary writing of 34 high school 2SUPnd/SUP year students who read two English texts with different degrees of difficulty. The analysis focused on the participants’ ability to distinguish between important and trivial ideas, their ability to connect the ideas with or without a connective word, and their strategies used in the summary writing. The result shows that a majority of the participants were able to distinguish between important ideas and trivial ideas in the reading texts. However, more than a few students had difficulty in connecting ideas smoothly. Particularly, the low-ability students had difficulty in achieving a smooth transition between ideas without using a connective word. In addition, the result also shows that the most frequently used strategy was “repetition” and strategies such as “paraphrase” and “transformation” were rarely used, reflecting the students’ currently low writing proficiency. Based on the result, the study concludes that the summary writing ability of Korean high school EFL students is currently quite elementary. Given that summarization is an important reading skill, it is argued that students must be provided with more opportunities to summarize the reading text through summary writing, which will require a long-term, systematic instruction, including instruction regarding the connection of ideas.