AN ANALYSIS OF SUMMARY-WRITING TASKS IN SECONDARY LEVEL ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

There are two parts to this study. The first part looks into the summary-writing tasks in three English Language coursebooks which are widely used at Secondary One and Four in Singapore Secondary schools. The coursebooks concerned are NEW CLUE 1/CLUE '0', the NEW EXPRESSWAY ENGLISH series and FORTE series. Summary-writing tasks given in workbooks and set by teachers are outside the purview of the study. This part of the study is to test the Instruction, Genre, Text Length and Summary Length Hypotheses. According to Hare , 'summary-writing tasks in textbooks do not contain full and explicit summarizing instructions but only simple directives to summarize brief chunks of the text.' (Hare, 1986). The other hypotheses suggest that the younger students be exposed to texts of more familiar genres, shorter texts and not be restricted by a summary length constraint. On the other hand, the older students could be set more difficult tasks, be exposed to texts of various genres, given longer texts to summarize and their summaries be constrained by word-limit. Part II of the dissertation supplement the analysis of the summary-writing tasks in textbooks. Part II is an exploratory study. It focusses its attention on how the text and task variables in the summary-writing tasks affect the strategies used in summary-writing. Three texts are selected from CLUE '0' and FORTE 4 based on variation in genre, text length and summary length. The purpose of this part is to determine how text genre, text length, summary length and summary type affect the process of summarization. Two kinds of analysis are used in this part. Part IIA analyzes the effect of the variables on strategies like selection of relevant important idea units, selection and/or invention of topic sentences, inclusion of irrelevant items and lastly, the superordination of items. Part IIB complements the first analysis of the strategies used by examining the two most common strategies used, more closely at macro-level. Part IIB further breaks the strategies down into 'paraphrasing of idea units', 'exact replication of idea units', ·combination of idea units', 'macropropositions', and 'metastatements'. Part IIB also examines how the variables influence distortion of information present in summaries. The second analysis uses a modified and expanded version of Johns' ‘Scale for Summary Protocol'.