Reading Comprehension

Summarising

A summary is a shortened version of a text. It contains the main points in the text and is written in your own words. It is a mixture of reducing a long text to a short text and selecting relevant information. A good summary shows that you have understood the text.

Look at this example:

The phrase "which is the animal class to which our frogs and toads belong" is an example, not a main point, and can be deleted. The rest of the text is rewritten in your own words.

The following stages may be useful:

1. Read and understand the text carefully.
2. Think about the purpose of the text.
   1. Ask what the author's purpose is in writing the text?
   2. What is your purpose in writing your summary?
   3. Are you summarising to support your points?
   4. Or are you summarising so you can criticise the work before you introduce your main points?
3. Select the relevant information. This depends on your purpose.
4. Find the main ideas - what is important.
   1. They may be found in topic sentences.
   2. Distinguish between main and subsidiary information.
   3. Delete most details and examples, unimportant information, anecdotes, examples, illustrations, data etc.
   4. Find alternative words/synonyms for these words/phrases - do not change specialised vocabulary and common words.
5. Change the structure of the text.
   1. Identify the meaning relationships between the words/ideas - e.g. cause/effect, generalisation, contrast. Look at Paragraphs: Signalling for more information. Express these relationships in a different way.
   2. Change the grammar of the text: rearrange words and sentences, change nouns to verbs, adjectives to adverbs, etc., break up long sentences, combine short sentences.
   3. Simplify the text. Reduce complex sentences to simple sentences, simple sentences to phrases, phrases to single words.
6. Rewrite the main ideas in complete sentences. Combine your notes into a piece of continuous writing. Use conjunctions and adverbs such as 'therefore', 'however', 'although', 'since', to show the connections between the ideas.
7. Check your work.
   1. Make sure your purpose is clear.
   2. Make sure the meaning is the same.
   3. Make sure the style is your own.

4b/c. Distinguish between main and subsidiary information. Delete most details and examples, unimportant information, anecdotes, examples, illustrations, data etc. Simplify the text. Reduce complex sentences to simple sentences, simple sentences to phrases, phrases to single words.

Examples:

1. People whose professional activity lies in the field of politics are not, on the whole, conspicuous for their respect for factual accuracy.
   Politicians often lie.
2. Failure to assimilate an adequate quantity of solid food over an extended period of time is absolutely certain to lead, in due course, to a fatal conclusion.
   If you do not eat, you die.
3. The climatic conditions prevailing in the British Isles show a pattern of alternating and unpredictable periods of dry and wet weather, accompanied by a similarly irregular cycle of temperature changes.
   British weather is changeable.
4. It is undeniable that the large majority of non-native learners of English experience a number of problems in attempting to master the phonetic patterns of the language.
   Many learners find English pronunciation difficult.
5. Tea, whether of the China or Indian variety, is well known to be high on the list of those beverages which are most frequently drunk by the inhabitants of the British Isles.
   The British drink a large amount of tea.
6. It is not uncommon to encounter sentences which, though they contain a great number of words and are constructed in a highly complex way, none the less turn out on inspection to convey very little meaning of any kind.
   Some long and complicated sentences mean very little.
7. One of the most noticeable phenomena in any big city, such as London or Paris, is the steadily increasing number of petrol-driven vehicles, some in private ownership, others belonging to the public transport system, which congest the roads and render rapid movement more difficult year by year.
   Big cities have growing traffic problems.

The Cornell Note-Taking Method

Note-Taking Area: Record lecture as fully and as meaningfully as possible.

Cue Column: As you’re taking notes, keep cue column empty. Soon after the lecture, reduce your notes to concise jottings as clues for Reciting, Reviewing, and Reflecting.

Summaries: Sum up each page of your notes in a sentence or two.

This format provides the perfect opportunity for following through with the 5 R’s of note-taking:

• Record
  During the lecture, record in the main column as many meaningful facts and ideas as you can. Write legibly.
• Reduce
  As soon after as possible, summarize these facts and ideas concisely in the Cue Column. Summarizing clarifies meanings and relationships, reinforces continuity, and strengthens memory.
• Recite
  Cover the Note Taking Area, using only your jottings in the Cue Column, say over the facts and ideas of the lecture as fully as you can, not mechanically, but in your own words. Then, verify what you have said.
• Reflect
  Draw out opinions from your notes and use them as a starting point for your own reflections on the course and how it relates to your other courses. Reflection will help prevent ideas from being inert and soon forgotten.
• Review
  Spend 10 minutes every week in quick review of your notes, and you will retain most of what you have learned.

Adapted from How to Study in College 7/e by Walter Pauk, 2001 Houghton Mifflin Company

Questions:

1- Give a title to this text.

2- Which skill/skills is/are targetted by this text?

3- Provide three tips that are explained in this text and explain them in your own words

4- Make a model of your own detailing the basic stepts a learner must follow while practising any of the activities explained above.

5- Extract from the text Repeated actions for the skills explained above

6- Extract from the text features that are specific to summary making, and features that are specific t note-taking.

7- Write a synthesis in which you cover the main ideas and tips presented in this text.

From http://www.uefap.com/reading/readframnote_sum.htm