Summarizing Strategies and Writing Ability of Iranian Intermediate EFL Students

Abstract

Improving writing instruction has been the focus of educational researchers during the last three decades. Instructions in writing strategies i.e. planning, drafting, revising have showed a dramatic effect on the students’ quality of writing. Moreover, the use of reading and reading strategies like summarization in writing classes has generated a great deal of debate. Employing the overlap of reading and writing strategies as a framework, the present study was conducted to investigate the possible relationship between explicit teaching of summarizing strategies and writing achievement. The study used a Quasi-experimental design. Two groups of intermediate efl students were assigned to experimental and control group. According to Nelson Proficiency test results, both groups were nearly at the same proficiency level. The experimental group, in addition to writing instruction, was taught summarizing strategies explicitly through CALLA. The control group only received the writing instruction in traditional way. The result of writing pre and posttest showed the positive effect of summarizing instruction on students’ writing ability. Comparing the mean score of experimental group on writing posttest (M= 14.6) with the mean score of control group on writing post-test (M= 12.8) revealed that groups have significant difference (P= .000 < .05) and the experimental group outperformed the control group in writing posttest. Therefore, it was concluded that explicit summarizing strategy instruction could be used effectively for Iranian language teaching and learning specially for improvement of their writing proficiency and improving the strategy use.