SUMMARIZING AND NOTE TAKING Classroom Recommendations
المؤلف:
Jane D. Hill Kathleen M. Flynn
المصدر:
Classroom Instruction that works with English Language Learners
الجزء والصفحة:
P63-C7
2025-09-10
325
SUMMARIZING AND NOTE TAKING
Classroom Recommendations
Classroom Instruction That Works offers three recommendations for incorporating summarization into the classroom.
1. Teach students the rule-based summarizing strategy. A particular set of steps is followed to produce a summary (e.g., keeping, deleting, and substituting information). Students will need to see this strategy modeled again and again. Attaching a nonlinguistic representation to the rules will benefit early-stage ELLs.
2. Use summary frames. There are six types of summary frames (see Appendix B): narrative, topic-restriction-illustration, argumentation, problem/solution, conversation, and definition (see below). All summary frames have a set of questions that extract important elements from the text. The answers to the questions are then used to summarize the text.
Each style of summary frame captures the basic structure of a different type of text. For example, let’s take a look at a definition frame. The purpose of a definition frame is to define a particular concept and identify other related concepts. There are four elements of a definition frame:
1. Term: the subject being defined
2. Set: the general category to which the term belongs
3. Gross characteristics: the characteristics that separate the term from other elements in the set
4. Minute differences: the different classes of objects that fall directly beneath the term
There are also four guiding questions for use when completing a definition frame:
1. What is being defined?
2. To which general category does the item belong?
3. What characteristics separate the item from the other items in the general category?
4. What are some types of classes of the item being defined?
Now let’s look at an example of how a definition frame can be used with ELLs at different stages of language acquisition. Students in Mr. Tate’s 3rd grade life science class are studying grasshoppers. Today, he is showing them a film. To guide their viewing, Mr. Tate presents the students with the four guiding definition frame questions listed above. For ELLs, he includes the chart depicted in Figure 1, with the frame questions accompanied by visuals.
Mr. Tate explains that answers to the frame questions can be found in the film. Students then watch the film with an eye toward answering the questions. When the film is over, Mr. Tate organizes the students into groups, where they compare their answers and construct a summary statement about grasshoppers.
3. Instruct students in reciprocal teaching as an aid to understanding expository text. Reciprocal teaching is a type of dialogue that students use to create meaning from text (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). When reviewing effective instructional programs for ELLs in elementary and middle schools, Fashola, Slavin, Calderón, and Durán (1997) reported that reciprocal teaching contributed to an improvement in reading comprehension. In the Classroom: A Toolkit for Effective Instruction of English Learners—available through the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition (n.d.b)—offers sample lessons and activities for reciprocal teaching and emphasizes the importance of modeling each step with ELLs.
Reciprocal teaching involves four components: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. For ELLs, it is critical to model each step and check for student understanding. Once the four components are learned, students can use them to monitor their reading for better comprehension.
The following is an adaptation involving the four components of reciprocal teaching that can be used as a whole-class activity or in small groups.
•Step 1: Summarizing. After students have silently or orally read a short section of a passage, a single student acting as teacher (i.e., the student leader) summarizes what has been read. Other students, with guidance from the student leader, may add to the summary. If students have difficulty summarizing, the teacher might point out clues (important items or obvious topic sentences) that aid in the construction of good summaries.
• Step 2: Questioning. The student leader asks some questions to which the class responds. The questions are designed to help students identify important information in the passage. For example, the student leader might look back over the selection and ask questions about specific pieces of information. The other students then try to answer these questions based on their recollection of the information.
• Step 3: Clarifying. The student leader tries to clarify confusing points in the passage. He might point these out or ask other students to point them out. For example, the student leader might say, “The part about why the dog ran into the car was confusing to me. Can anyone explain this?” Or the student leader might direct students to ask clarification questions. The group then attempts to clear up the confusing parts, which might involve rereading parts of the passage.
• Step 4: Predicting. The student leader asks for predictions about what will happen in the next segment of the text. The leader can write the predictions on the blackboard or on an overhead, or students can write them down.
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