Comparing Summaries of a Narrative Story Produced under Different Conditions

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether Japanese university EFL students produce summaries of a narrative story differently under two different conditions: When they refer to the original text and when they do not do so. Specifically, the study examined the students’ use of selection and deletion rules as well as paraphrasing strategies. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. The results of the analysis revealed that, when they referred to the original text, the students produced summaries that included more idea units with details, longer and syntactically more complex sentences, and a variety of transitions. On the other hand, without the original passage, the students wrote summaries that were concise, with the focus on main idea units, and that used syntactically less complex sentences, but extensive paraphrases. These results suggest that EFL teachers need to carefully examine the use of the original text in a summarizing task. Producing a summary without an original text is seldom practiced in regular EFL classrooms in Japan. However, EFL teachers need to consider the potential pedagogical effectiveness of producing summaries without an original text if they want to develop their students’ spontaneous paraphrasing skills.