Supportive Strategies in Teaching Summary Writing to Secondary Level ESL/EFL Learners

Abstract

The entire aim of writing this paper is to discuss and explore the effectiveness of various supporting strategies/ techniques in order to teach summary writing to secondary school students. As we know that English has gained a global position in terms of its usage therefore, the teaching methodology should also be simplified. In English language teaching, writing is considered as the toughest and hardest skill to overcome, as it is not an easy skill that could be learned without much practice and effort. Similarly, writing a summary is also a challenging task in written communication. A summary expresses an idea, feeling and opinion in writing, but in a concise form. Students are often confused as it is a hard task for them to write a summary of a given text in the class at high school level. They find teacher as an absolute and ultimate source to lead them to follow the path of summary writing. A teacher can provide them simple and easy strategies/techniques for summary writing. A teacher can introduce them different supportive, simple strategies to write a good summary e.g. 1. He may give his students a short text to read silently, 2. Teacher can explain an organizer for summarizing a text, 3. He can ask the students to make points for summary writing in their own words seeking help from the text and from the organizer, 4. Finally they can produce a summary with the help of these points. We can conclude that simple, clear and easy strategies /techniques in summary writing can help the students in improving their writing. These strategies may also prove helpful for teachers in the teaching of writing a summary effectively and efficiently.