In preparing and writing the executive summary, report writing and annotated bibliographies, writing activities revolved around reading source texts, understanding and summarizing the main points. Reading was seen as a preparation to writing, an integrated task that required the students to read through and condense original texts (full articles or short passages) in order to carry out specific writing tasks. The teachers viewed the development of reading strategies as essential before the pre-writing stages began.
5.2.1.1 Reading to write an Executive Summary
Although the course stipulates that the Executive Summary be written in pairs, Ms Raisha asked students to read the source texts individually and later compare their findings: “…
having a good strategy for reading will ease the process of understanding ones reading material in locating the right information for the later use in summary writing”.
Regardless of the length of the text, she felt that it was good practice for the students to identify and write out the main ideas presented in order to understand the whole article.
It is important to start first by skimming through the entire passage without evaluating and analyzing […] later you can scan the passage to familiarize yourself with reading […] look for features that are pertinent or the elements that you do not understand […] after identifying, write it out.
(Ms Raisha)
She felt that a good strategy was to write down visual notes in order to recognise the links between ideas. She said, points that are in visual forms could easily be understood.
She also believed that text could be better understood by underlining, highlighting, note writing and visual maps and felt that it could help with clarity of ideas during group discussion.
Ms Raisha went round the classroom to check on students’ work. She suddenly stopped at one student who was busy highlighting the lines from th e passage. […] Ms Raisha then asked him when was he going to write the points on paper. I heard the student said that he feared he could not finish the task on time (admitted as a slow reader) and therefore identifying ideas and point by highlighting could help him to save time. Ms Raisha suggested that the ideas can be in mind map for him to remember but he said he could remember without writing […] Ms Raisha insisted her students to draw a mind map or any visuals alike detailing their understanding so that they could compare the answers easily with their friends if they have missed out anything.
(Fieldnotes, 20/04/2016)
Some students seemed to feel that reading before summary writing was merely in order to identify facts and then to apply the strategies that they had been practicing for their other Law courses.
I heard this, could not really tell who made the claim […] something about how the students get to read and understand as Law students – a cumulative voice I heard during one classroom observation […] something about they have trained their brain to memorize
(Fieldnotes, 20/04/2016)
They felt this might work in Ms Raisha’s class. However, Ms Raisha said,
memorizing does not prove them having a good understanding of the text. A good summary writing will take place when the students are able to understand the content of the article and able to lift out the most highlighted points to be reported back in a shorter paragraph form.
(Ms Raisha)
Ms Raisha felt that her students’ understanding of source text for summary writing was limited by their ‘limited lexical density’, and that a good understanding of the text could be gained by comprehension of the important vocabulary. She believed that this could be done by checking new and difficult words using a dictionary or contextual clues for their meaning, and by writing out points in visual form. However, one of her students, Shuhada, still found it challenging to write her Executive Summary. She was discouraged by what she called ‘difficult words’ which affected her attitude towards writing, concluding that text comprehension was related to effective summary writing.
I know that it is important to understand what you read in the article before writing the summary but when there are so many difficult words […] I just don’t feel like reading difficult text and because of this I fail to identify and decide what important points to choose and write for my summary.
(Shuhada)
The issue raised by Ms Raisha seemed to also be of concern to Shuhada and her problem with digesting ‘difficult words’ contributed to a negative classroom writing experience.
5.2.1.2 Reading to Write Annotated Bibliographies
In Dr Dalia’s classroom, writing an annotated bibliography was one of the writing tasks. The task required students learning to read effectively and acquiring reading strategies during the summary writing of source text. When deciding what to include and exclude in summary writing, students were required to identify its thesis, research questions or hypothesis, and, more importantly, to gauge the author’s tone in order to understand its argument and purpose.
How do you know what kind of tone used by the author?
(Dr Dalia) By understanding writer’s expression […] from the choice of word […] the words used in the text will help us to have a certain view, attitude or having certain concern about this issue […] like maybe using contextual clues (cumulative responses from the class)
(Classroom Observation 4, 9/05/2016)
Dr Dalia recommended reading to be done in groups. Group members would discuss an article and she would ask them the meaning of words, for example sarcastic, neutral,
bias, optimistic and disappointment, directing them to pay attention to how these words
might indicate the author’s tone.
I saw some students immediately flipped their 2 inches thick dictionary [...] I remember Dr Dalia asked them to bring a dictionary each last week. However, some just scrolled their hand phones conveniently and some waited patiently for the other group members to explain the meaning of the words […]one student threw a definition for the word sarcastic but Dr Dalia insisted her to check the exact meaning. She cautioned the student that if not sure, guessing for meanings could mislead them to the understanding of the author’s argument from the source text.
Dr Dalia emphasized the importance of understanding the correct meaning of words. When students completed writing their annotated bibliography, she assisted them, when necessary, to help them see the author’s purpose and arguments.
Dr Dalia did some reading with her students today, trying to highlight what were discussed in the article by extracting the important points in each paragraph and urged her students to put id eas in an outline – a skeleton form according to her so that easy for the students to see and understand.
(Fieldnotes, 28/03/2016)
Dr Dalia directed students towards writing an online, and suggested that brainstorming could help to develop thoughts during group work.
The format of the outline is already controlled by the syllabus (referring to the rubrics). They (students) are supposed to have a thesis statement with four supporting details. When the students read, they also have to understand and talk about the possible audience, tone […] even for synthesis (second writing task), students are expected the same to read to prepare an outline too before they could write. But most importantly students need to know what to look for when they read.
(Dr Dalia)
Dr Dalia also gave extensive reading instructions, based on her belief that students needed clear direction when completing their writing tasks. In addition to group working, students had to choose three articles based upon a theme assigned by Dr Dalia. She advised them to read the articles a few times to ensure that they discussed the same theme.
For your assignment on annotated bibliography, find three to four articles of the same theme […] please read your articles carefully as main ideas maybe scattered […] you should formulate those three ideas/ aspects and find its supporting details […]extract those ideas […] if there are so many ideas, ignore them or group them together into big headings, remember to only emphasize only on the criteria for marking […] only extract what is related to the ideas.
(Fieldnotes, 28/03/2016)
Dr Dalia’s practices ensured that as preparation to writing the outline and the annotated bibliography writing, the reading process involved questioning and clarification.
It is not easy to determine the main idea in the article. What you need to do is to look at the whole picture, ask yourself some questions […] and then you will get to understand it.
Dr Dalia helped her students to ‘look at the whole picture’ by asking them questions to clarify their understanding of the texts. Some of these questions were,
What is the purpose of the text? […] what is the author’s tone? […] who is the article written for? […] what is the thesis for this article? […] What kind of information did the paragraph provide? […] Are there any citations? […] Do you agree with what has been written by the author? […] What do you think about the article?
(Dr Dalia)
Through these questions, she was able to monitor her students’ comprehension of the source texts. Indeed, she saw asking questions as a key reading strategy, one that helped her students to distinguish important information and details and thereby enable them to use clues in the text to anticipate what to include in their annotated biography.