![]() ![]() The summary response essay is a tried-and-true tool for developmental English as a Second Language writing and reading courses. Argumentation is a concept that will take students some time to digest, so if students can work within a familiar framework, it minimizes the amount of new information that needs to be processed at once. If they are working within the familiar framework of the summary response essay, they will be free to explore how concession and refutation can be used to strengthen opinions and enhance critical thinking. This allows students to focus on dealing with their ideas without needing to also worry about organizational issues in the essay. When students have become comfortable using the summary response format, argumentation can be introduced using the same structure. Like anything we teach, summarizing needs to be broken down step by step when students first are first beginning to learn how to do so, and collaboration among classmates when students are first learning this concept will be very useful. Students can use a summary gird to take notes and then further synthesize the information to decide what to include in a summary. It can be divided by sentence, paragraph, or section, depending on the length of the text. ![]() This graphic organizer is simply a chart that has space for students to write the main idea of portions of the text. ![]() A summary grid is a useful tool for helping students to pull main ideas out of a text before organizing them into a piece of writing. Often, students are tempted to include too many details, and a summary can turn into one long paraphrase in which students include too many details. When teaching students how to summarize, the focus should be on main ideas. Likewise, if a student is strong reader, summarizing will be challenging if his or her writing skills are not of a comparable proficiency level. If students are at a deficit in reading proficiency, the writing aspect of summarizing will be incredibly difficult. It’s especially challenging because a student’s ability to do so effectively depends on both reading and writing skills. This writing task is a fundamentally important one, as it will be a useful and necessary technique in many academic writing assignments that ESL students encounter in their studies. ![]()
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