TASK 4: SUMMARISING SHORT PASSAGES IN ONE OR TWO SENTENCES

This task is designed to encourage students to select main points only and should be done quickly. You might like to discuss briefly the role of supporting information in the texts.

 

TASKS 5 AND 6: CHOOSING SATISFACTORY GLOBAL AND SELECTIVE SUMMARIES

These tasks focus on global summarising and selective summarising. While it has not been possible to provide a wider range of texts covering several major fields, the first article in each task, 'Fire stones support catastrophe theory' and 'Japan paves way for big foreign influx' is of a sufficiently general nature to be accessible intellectually to most students.

Note that in the summary examples, reference to the source is always made. This is done to make students aware of the importance of acknowledgement – it is not necessary here to go into details. These are focused on in Task. The question of acknowledging paraphrased writing is discussed in the section entitled 'A brief digression on plagiarism'.

 

TASKS 7 AND 8: GLOBAL AND SELECTIVE NOTE-TAKING AN RECONSTITUTION

These are designed to combine note-taking and summarising practice. Task 8 is guided, in that students are told what information to look for.