Reading to summarize in English and Chinese: A tale of two languages?

Abstract

The cognitive demands of summary writing are dependent upon the type of summary to be produced. This paper reports part of a larger study in which 157 Chinese undergraduates were asked to write summaries of extended English texts in both English and Chinese. It examines the differential effects of the use of the two languages on summarization as a measure of reading comprehension, drawing upon data from students' actual test performances as well as their perceptions of such differential effects, as evidenced in the post-summarization questionnaire and interviews. It was found that the use of the different languages had significant effects on both summarization processes and products. Students wrote significantly longer Chinese summaries but these were rated consistently of poorer quality than English summaries. However, Chinese summarization was found to be a better measure of students' English reading abilities. The implications of these findings are discussed with specific reference to summarization task design, in particular, how the use of the first and target languages may affect test takers' performance as well as rater behaviours and the potential of using first language in large-scale international language testing programmes incorporating integrated reading/writing tasks as a measure of reading comprehension.

Proficiency, language of assessment, and attention to meaning and form during L2 comprehension: Methodological considerations in L2 replication research

“…Language of assessment is another key variable to be considered, and there is a large body of research examining the role of the mother tongue in teaching and assessing foreign languages (for an overview, see Shin et al, 2020). Both the language and method of assessment can affect comprehension results, with learners’ scores being a function of their abilities but also the test format (e.g., Godev et al, 2002; Gordon & Hanauer, 1995; Shohamy, 1984; Yu, 2008). For instance, Yu (2008) found that L1-Chinese learners’ summarization of information in Chinese rather than in English was a better measure of their reading ability.…”

Lexical repetiton in academic discourse: a computer-aided study of the text organizing role of repetition

“…My main motivation behind this was twofold. Most studies on summary writing use abridged/ simplified texts as input (see e.g., Yu, 2008Yu, , 2009. These texts are usually from course books or news popular 34 as accessed from http:/www.wikipedia.org/ryanair, on 2 February, 2011 science articles, and have a rather clear, didactic organization.…”

“…This ranking formed the objective basis of student text judgement. This method was modified and simplified for the purposes of this study informed by Yu's (2008) main idea collection method in the following way: two native speakers were given the task description and the source text. They were asked to read the texts and select the main ideas from the source text based on the summary construct.…”

Establishing an Operational Model of Rating Scale Construction for English Writing Assessment

“…Despite the prevalence of summary writing in language assessments and studies concerning how students should be trained for summary writing assessment tasks (Jin, 2016) and the construct of summary writing (Li, 2014;Yu, 2007Yu, , 2008Yu, , 2009, little attrition has been paid to investigate how summary writing should be rated or how its rating scales could be developed. In classroom teaching, teachers usually rely on three options to rate students' manuscripts including directly using an existing scale, adapting scales and creating a scale from scratch (Perlman, 2003).…”