however, it has not much transferred to ESL (English as a Second Language) or EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms. The present study thus proposed the need to incorporate a summarizing instruction into English classes, and investigated how the summarizing instruction affects Korean EFL students’ cognitive processes, especially in reading.A total of 104 Korean high school students in the 12th grade participated in this study. The present study employed both introspective and retrospective measures to examine the learners’ reading comprehension processes, using questionnaires as well as think-aloud protocols. The students responded to reading strategy checklists shortly after solving each of the ten reading comprehension questions before and after the summary instruction. Nine representative students voluntarily participated in think-aloud protocols. In addition, the instructional effect was examined not only for learners’ different proficiency levels but for different types of reading questions. The same type of reading comprehension test as the pre-test was used to measure changes in the students’ performances after summarizing instruction.The study found that summary writing instruction had a significant effect on the use of meta-cognitive strategies compared to that of task-oriented and cognitive strategies. Specifically, summary instruction turned out to be effective in heightening awareness of the discourse structure and directing the students’ attention to key sentences. Think-aloud protocols revealed the students’ decreased use of inefficient strategies (e.g., ;;translating only what the reader knows’ and ;;selecting the answer with uncertainty’) and increased use of desirable strategies (e.g., ;;predicting’, ;;goal-setting’, and ;;detecting key words or sentences’). Summary instruction was the most effective in the intermediate proficiency group with regard to the awareness of meta-cognitive strategies.Regarding the reading comprehension question types, the summary instruction group showed the most distinctive improvements in their strategy use both in the questions pertaining to the top-down macro- and integrative processing and in the questions relating to drawing inferences. The group was also found to outperform the control group in the standardized reading test.The present study shows the need to pay more attention to summarizing instruction in EFL reading classes. It is because summary writing offers an integrative training by combining reading and writing, reduces a sense of fear in English writing, and enhances students’ thinking ability especially in meta-cognition. Well-designed summary instruction can enable EFL students to be ;;constructively responsive readers” by improving their reading (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995).
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Effects of Summarizing Instruction on Korean High School Students' English Reading Comprehension
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