| Abstrakt: | The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to analyse the influence of systematic summarisation of texts, that were selected from regular coursebooks to teach English as a foreign language, on the development of reading and writing skills in English. The dissertation starts with a short review of definitions of summary which are
followed by a presentation of various terms close in meaning to summary taken both from Polish and English literature. Subseąuently, the formal features of summary have been gathered, systematised and discussed: length, fidelity and distance between a summary and a source text. Fidelity has been interpreted in the context
of four subcategories: selectiveness, ordering of information, paraphrasing and copying, and adding extra elements to a summary. The chapter ends with the extended defmition of summary formulated on the basis of the discussed features followed by the examination of parameters which influence the ąuality of written summaries. The second chapter presents a cognitive aspect of a summarisation process.
Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) created a model of text comprehension and summarisation which is based on the concepts of microstructure and macrostructure. The former corresponds to all the information present in a discourse, the latter constitutes a gist of a discourse. The process of summarisation is viewed as a transition from microlevel to macrolevel by means of three basie cognitive macrorules: deletion, generalisation and
construction. These macrooperations vary in their cognitive difficulty, and the construction has been ąualified as the most demanding cognitive operation. The Kintsch and van Dijk’s model is not the only theory which attempts to explain the process of summarisation. Rumelhart formulated his model on the basis of comprehension schemata consisting of many levels which can be presented in a graphic form. The more advanced level of a discourse is investigated, the more details are released. For this reason summaries should be built upon the starting levels of graphic representations of schemata. The last theory discussed in the chapter is Sherrard’s
topographical model of summarising75. The chapter ends with a cognitive analysis of how summary writing influences a memorisation process. The third chapter investigates the issue of summarisation teaching. It starts with the systematic presentation of summary writing techniąues which were applied in different types of research on summarisation. Next, different approaches to summarisation teaching have been analysed together with various methods of summary assessment. The next chapter’s aim is to present the selected aspects of research on summarising. The selected experiments have been grouped under the following topics:
strategies used by children, teenagers and adults; summarising in LI and L2; the influence of L2 proficiency on summary writing. The analysis of research outeomes shows that summary strategies use develops with age. The exception to this statement is construction which is dependent on cognitive development and successfully used by persons who are engaged in writing and reading professionally e.g. academic stuff. The research area focusing on comparison of summarisation in LI and L2 shows two tendencies. The first one stresses the impact of L2 deficit on summarising in L2 which results in poorer ąuality of summaries written in L2 than those constructed in LI. The second one focuses on similarities between summary writing in LI and L2 proving
that the processes underlying summarising are independent of any language. The investigation of the influence of L2 proficiency on summary writing shows that it is not a dominant parameter which guarantees high ąuality of summaries. It has been proved that knowledge and reading/writing experience mainly determine
summarisation effects. Students on the intermediate level can produce better summaries than proficient students provided that they skilfully use appropriate summarisation strategies and are able to differentiate between important and not important information in a text.Chapter 5 starts the description of empirical research which has been organised to measure the influence of summarising on reading and writing in English as a foreign
language. The experiment was conducted at Akademia Techniczno-Humanistyczna in Bielsko-Biała and involved 83 students of the first year of the International Relations faculty. Two groups were involved in the research. An experimental group attended an English language course which was based on written summarising of texts. A control group attended the course which was based on the same texts but they were followed by
practise based on activities suggested by a coursebook they were taken from. The research showed that summarisation develops comprehension ability efficiently. After 6 months of summary writing students from the experimental group improved their scores in text comprehension, measured by FCE test, by 22.5% and a
control group only by 4.6%. A positive influence of summarising was also observed in the case of writing. It
was observed that argumentative essays produced by the experimental group were more correct in terms of grammar and lexis than the ones written by the control group. In addition students from experimental group had no problems with verbalising their thoughts in English which resulted in few semantic errors. The control group made numerous semantic errors which resulted in many non-comprehensible parts of their essays. Moreover, summarising helped students to use diversified vocabulary in an efficient way. Summing up, the research proved that summary writing not only develops successful text comprehension but it is also a very efficient means to teach lexis and grammar. The dissertation finishes with an attempt to explain the efficiency of summarising in the context of foreign language teaching. One of the theories which accounts for the success of summary writing is Craik and Lockhart’s theory of deep Processing. In order to summarise the text its contents need to be processed on deep levels. This is connected with a deep cognitive analysis which results in better
memorising of summarised contents and vocabulary which represents the contents. Other factors responsible for efficiency of a language course based on text summarising are as follows: data organization which due to ACT Theory helps to memorise the data, constructing macrostructure of a discourse which results in its durable
memorisation, analysing the structure of a text and discovering its sense which are essential for
successful text comprehension, high activity of a summariser that is a factor which influences durability and
faithfulness of data storage, a productive way of grammar and vocabulary practise. |