Investigating the Strategies and Problems of Iranian EFL Learners While Writing Summaries in Academic Contexts

Abstract

The present study intended to investigate the summary writing strategy use and writing quality of 57 Iranian EFL learners in an academic setting. As for collecting the required data, the students (1) completed an expository essay (as a measure of their writing competence), (2) summarized the literature review section of a research paper (as a measure of summary writing quality), and (3) responded to the items of a summary writing strategy questionnaire (exploring the extent of planning, discourse synthesis, source use, and evaluation strategy use). The results of this study indicated that the participants produced better texts in terms of content compared to the form (cohesion and coherence) and language use. In producing their texts, they made the most use of evaluation strategies in comparison to the other summary writing strategies. There was also a moderate relationship between writing competence, summary writing quality, and strategy use. Moreover, MANOVA results revealed significant differences among high-skilled, moderately-skilled, and low-skilled student writers in summary writing quality and strategy use. Subsequently, the main problems encountered by these students while summarizing the passages were identified by soliciting their own views and analyzing the content of the texts they produced. Finally, it was suggested that in order to improve the quality of students' summary writing, writing courses must be complemented with explicit instruction of the conventions governing this academic genre, teach the summarization strategies through adequate modeling and scaffolding and give the students opportunities to practice and use the strategies while working on real pedagogical tasks.