Abstract

BEKE, Rebecca  and  BRUNO DE CASTELLI, Elba. Teachers and students’ summarization skills. Rev. Ped [online]. 2005, vol.26, n.75, pp.9-30. ISSN 0798-9792.

In this work, as part of a wider research, our objective is twofold: to analyze in-service teachers’ written summaries and compare the results of this study with those of a previous study carried out with high school graduates. A corpus of one hundred eighty-six summaries written during a reading comprehension course were analyzed to answer the following questions: Do the summaries improve in terms of content and rhetorical structure? 2) What strategies do the participants use in writing a shorter and new version of the text? 3) Are there differences between the two groups? The results indicate significant improvement with respect to content and presence of the macroproposition. However, both groups show difficulty in maintaining the pragmatic condition and an appropriate tone. While teachers tend to use the quasi copy, paraphrase, elimination and construction, students prefer the elimination and copy strategy. We conclude that summarization skills include not only the mastery and adequate use of reading strategies but the mastery of cognitive, linguistic and discursive strategies as well.

Keywords : summarization; structure; strategies; macrorules.