L2 Reading Comprehension and Lexical Usage in Writing by Summarizing Instruction

This study aimed to examine how explicit summarizing instruction and practices can influence reading comprehension and lexical usage in writing by Korean EFL learners in classroom contexts. For the study, the value of summarizing in L2 learning and lexical usage in writing were discussed. The results showed that learners could significantly better understand reading passages than before the summarizing intervention. In lexical diversity, overall learners could use more diverse and advanced lexical items in post-compositions. The average TTR (type/token ratio) for three word lists, the 2nd 1000 word list, academic word list (AWL), and not-in-the-list words (NLW), increased significantly, whereas that of the 1st 1000 list decreased slightly in the post-writings. In terms of lexical sophistication measured by the total number of tokens in both AWL and NLW, learners showed significantly higher degrees of AWL, with slightly more in NLW in their post-writings. This positive effect would appear to be attributed to integrated summarizing processes with reading source texts about different topics, while deleting unimportant information and focusing on key words, phrases or sentence level comprehension for bottom-up processes, which was followed by output activities that transferred those expressions into their writing through sentence combination, paraphrasing, syntactic transformation and invention with dictionary use, teacher modelling and feedback.