A genre-based approach to teaching EFL summary writing

This study utilizes a pre-test/post-test assessment to investigate the instructional efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching summary writing. Forty-one EFL university students in Taiwan were asked before and after the instruction to summarize a simplified version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a maximum of 500 words. All the students' summaries on the pre- and post-tests were evaluated against content, organization, vocabulary, and language use. The statistical results showed that such an approach was effective in improving students' overall summarization performance of a narrative source text and that the students benefited to a greater extent in content and organization than in vocabulary and language use. The results were also supported by the students' interview comments.