Summary writing: Remedy and resource

Abstract

Analyzing a corpus of summaries written by second-year students of History and Anthropology (at Belgrade's Faculty of Philosophy), the author points to the effectiveness of summary writing in mastering a range of writing/reading skills, particularly those that students have failed to acquire in their earlier education. A considerable emphasis is placed on the relevance of selected information, its coherence and organization, as well as to adopting the appropriate tone/stance while summarizing a text. Given the varied language proficiency levels of the ESP/EAP students in question, the teacher can use summary writing to cover tasks ranging from basic paragraph writing to the more demanding ones such as discourse analysis. Summary writing is here seen not only as a remedial tool and a rich source of material for dealing with the challenges of both writing and reading (basic to advanced) but also as an efficient device for assessing these skills. Hence the author's strong belief that summary writing, as an integral part of an ESP/EAP course, paves the way for mastering other, more complex and more sophisticated academic tasks.