Good and Poor Summary Writers' Strategies: The Case of Japanese High School EFL Learners

Despite general belief about the importance of summary writing in foreign language education, and in the field of teaching Language for Academic Purposes (LAP) (e.g., Swales, 1981; 2000), it is shown that the development of this skill is one of the most difficult skills for learners (e.g., Brown and Day, 1980; Hirvela & Du, 2013; Shi, 2012). This study is part of a larger project and its main purpose is to open the black box by exploring the relationship between performances of summary writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and the strategies used for summary writing in EFL. A total of 74 Japanese high school EFL learners were asked to write a summary of one-third of approximately 230 word-long English passage and were subsequently asked to respond to the summary strategy inventory adapted partly from Li (2014). The data analysis showed that there was indeed a relationship between the quality of the students' summaries and the frequency of their implemented strategies. In this study, along with the results of in-depth analyses, various implications are offered to EFL education as well as future research studies.