SUMMARIZATION AS A KEY ACADEMIC COMPETENCE

Summary writing is a key competence in academic settings as, according to Johns (1993: 277), “it is impossible to assign academic writing tasks that don't require preliminary reading”. It constitutes part of larger assignments, where source material is integrated with the writer's original discourse, e.g., article summaries and critiques, research papers, academic essays, literature reviews, annotated bibliographies and research proposals, and as such, it is a valuable study aid in reading to learn (Kirkland and Saunders 1991).

Summarization tasks are also often included in assessments of writing skills, due to their authenticity and proximity to real-life writing tasks (Cumming et al. 2004: 134). Summarization serves as an aid in reading and a marker of a student's or scholar's understanding of disciplinary content as it requires the writer to position themselves in a field of knowledge by representing the contributions of others so that they can be compared, contrasted and evaluated, and by incorporating information from a variety of sources in ways that support the writer's own purpose or argument. As an instructional task, together with paraphrasing and quoting, it is assigned to practice integrating and synthesizing source texts and as such, it is critical for the prevention of plagiarism (McDonough et al. 2014). It is also a core requirement for students to make the shift from consumers of research-based knowledge to creators of research-based knowledge (Hood 2008: 351).

As a skill, summarizing develops relatively late, requires cognitive maturity, and imposes a considerable cognitive load. Brown et al. (1983: 968) remark that “the ability to work recursively on information to render it as succinctly as possible requires judgement and effort, knowledge and strategies, and is therefore, late developing”. Students should not be expected to produce formal academic summaries until they have at least a high-intermediate level of proficiency (Kirkland and Saunders 1991: 108).

SUMMARIZATION AS AN INTEGRATIVE TASK

From the point of L2 development, because it involves both reading and writing skills, summarization is an integrative language learning task. Where reading is concerned, effective summarizing requires understanding of the key ideas in a text and an ability to distinguish among the main points and supporting details, and, at the same time, to evaluate the quality of the written outcomes (Hayes 1996 in Delaney 2008: 141).