Teaching students to summarize: applying textlinguistics

The findings from research on written and oral summarization are discussed under three headings: summarizers' strategies, improving summarizers' performance, and the assessment of summary quality. Most research on summarizers' strategies has been based on the Macrostructure model of van Dijk and Kintsch, and provides broad confirmation of it. Clear-cut rules for summarization have been devised and successfully taught, although the central strategy, that of selecting important information, is least understood and most resistant to instruction. Summarizers' performance divides into two classes: “mature” performance involves a deep-level transformation of a text, departing from surface wording and the original order of propositions; “immature” performance is confined to the deletion, or verbatim retention, of surface elements. The objective measures of summary quality used by researchers are described, and ways in which these could be adapted for use in higher education assessment are indicated.