How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Summarising
How to teach non-fiction
Summarising has become relevant again and most exam boards address the skill within their specification in some manner. Often they refer to it as ’implied meaning’ and the summary aspect is implied in the question. However, AQA are one example of an exam board with a specific summary question on the GCSE English language paper 2. For a long while, textual analysis formed the basis of pretty much all work in lessons, but now we need to teach students how to summarise a text. One of the reasons why they struggle with this is because of the phrase, ’write it in your own words’. When they receive this instruction, you get the text reduced rather than summarised. They copy out large chunks and pass it off as a summary.
I’ve already mentioned inference words in poetry — remember, these are often abstract nouns — but they can be used for all texts. If we take the extract from The People of the Abyss, we could attach the following inference words: ’ignorant’, ’escapism’, ’surprising’, ’unexpected’, ’pleasure’. This gets students used to attaching words to ideas rather than just repeating what happens in the text — this is the synthesis part of the summary.
Take this piece from the Guardian’s newspaper archive. It describes the events on the night the Titanic sunk:
Late last night the White Star officials in New York announced that a message had been received stating that the Titanic sank at 2.20 yesterday morning after all her passengers and crew had been transferred to another vessel. Later they admitted that many lives had been lost. An unofficial message from Cape Race, Newfoundland, stated that only 675 have been saved out of 2,200 to 2,400 persons on board. This was in some degree confirmed later by White Star officials in Liverpool, who said they were afraid the report was likely to prove true. Assuming that only 675 of the passengers and crew have been saved, and taking the smallest estimate of the number of people on board, the disaster is one of the most awful in the history of navigation, for at least 1,500 lives have been lost.3
Compare the extract to this summary:
There was lots of confusion at the start and uncertainty about how many people survived and died as a result of the event. It was later discovered that, in reality, things had been far worse than expected.
Now we can ask some interesting questions:
✵ What words are summarising the text?
✵ Where can we find examples of these points in the original text?
✵ Can we rephrase things?
✵ What is missing?
’Summarise the text’ seems such an easy and, probably, glib instruction to give to students, but it is a process that we don’t look at often enough in lessons. I’ll be bold and say that more time spent on summarising could improve students’ thinking and writing overall. Precision in thinking has always separated the top from the rest in English. Clear and precise thoughts get the marks over rambling, vague and confused ’brain dribblings’. By getting students to look at their summary and its relationship with the text, you expose their understanding. You see what they have neglected, misunderstood or made up. Again, vocabulary is a key part of this. A student can find a billion clever examples of similes, but unless they have a coherent viewpoint about why they are used it remains technique vomiting. In the beginning was the word. For secondary English teachers: in the beginning was the summary.