How do you teach summarizing?

I use scrolls rather than books to teach summarization.  A summary is a statement of one's understanding of the whole.  In teaching summarization of book content, one challenge to consider is that the book never lets us see more than two facing pages — which is but a fraction the whole.  Our books are implicit — literally, infolded (im+plicare).  This is how our books are made — by a process of infolding to form signatures, which are stacked and bound between covers.  The content within this implicit form is largely hidden from view, and hence difficult to summarize.  Certainly, we expect skilled readers to summarize book content, but the process of learning this skill calls for a different book format — one that is the opposite of implicit, which is to say, one that is explicit (ex+plicare), or literally unrolled.  An explicit book form displays the whole text in a single, panoramic view; it is spread out to  encourage and facilitate conversation, and wide-open to understanding.  Students can learn much more quickly how to summarize when scrolls are used.

When working with beginning writers, learners often desire to just spit a collection of sentences on paper at first. With some writers, it is helpful to start with an outline of thoughts. I may use prompts to help learners formulate such as, "What happens first....and then what gets in the way... and how is that resolved ...?" These main ideas can then be fleshed out into complete thoughts, or paragraphs. Having paragraphs that flow well through the main ideas makes for some good writing. 

If students are comfortable with the idea that a paragraph is often describing a thought, then it is often effective to reverse the process when reading. As learners struggle with comprehension, I will often ask at the end of reading a paragraph, "What do we think was the main thought of that paragraph?" As students, working in pairs, start to make a list of main thoughts they often start to see how a number of main thoughts might blend all together into a broader group like, "The author shared details of what made that event so horrible." after 3 or 4 paragraphs describing specifics about a negative event. 

With some students, I find it is helpful to make the connection between summarizing a reading and outlining key thoughts in writing. This connection then leads to some wonderful discussions about the use of language and why people don't just write out the main thoughts compared to verbose embellishments? We can then tie into the author's tone, intent, and other elements that go so much further than just a bunch of words spit out on some pages. 

I have felt that this approach helps to improve both reading comprehension and writing at the same time. Do others have similar or contrary thoughts or experiences? I have experienced some student that this approach does not work well with. Without me sharing those details right off, what kinds of learners do you feel might struggle with this approach? What other approaches might work with those that struggle with this comparison approach?

I teach summarizing by carefully choosing an article that is well organized and not too difficult for the student to read. It needs to be long enough to be summarized, but not so long that students get bogged down in the reading. After students have read the article, I ask students to give me the main idea of each paragraph by asking them what the paragraph is about. I then write on the board notes (not in sentence form) of the information they've given me. After that I give them an example of notes and a summary I've written of a different article as well as the original article. I then have them write their summary from the notes they've given me on the board from their article. I then take the students' summaries home and make corrections and see what has caused confusion. Then we go through some issues that the students have had and I have the students do a correction of the summary. I have a power point regarding teaching summary writing that I gave at a state ESL conference a few years ago, but I don't know how I can share that in this format.

In response to Edward, Kathy, and Terry: The approaches that you recommend certainly can work well, which is why many of your colleagues use them (or should be using them).  I would add that if you have your students do these things while reading from and working on a scroll, you'll get noticeably-better results.  The scroll is just a better place for students to do the work of learning summarization.

The distinction between implicit and explicit displays is the key to understanding this.  Our bound books are literally implicit (produced through a process of infolding, such that the pages are hidden within the folds, hence rendering the information in a form that is complicated and confusing); our digital books are arguably worse (they reveal about half of what can be seen in the bound book's relatively generous two-page display, which is why readers even more difficulty comprehending digital texts than they do with bound texts).  Scrolls, in contrast, are literally explicit (unrolled or unfolded, and hence wide-open to understanding).

Educators commonly speak of being explicit.  Of all the book forms — ancient or modern, paper or digital — only scrolls are explicit.  Our bound and digital books are most definitely not explicit.  That is a real problem for teaching and learning.

Finally, I wanted to add a thought about working on summarization by starting at the paragraph level.  My experience is that paragraphs tend to fit together in groups, which is to say that plodding along paragraph by paragraph usually (not always, but usually — at least with authentic, as opposed to canned, texts) focuses students too close to the details rather than the big ideas.  I'd suggest backing off a bit from the ground-level view, and work instead on identifying groups of paragraphs that work together to treat a topic or argument.

For example, before plunging in to read an essay (say, an OpEd piece from a quality newspaper, or a longer piece of investigative journalism) they might read just the first sentence (or clause) of each paragraph, and quickly decide which paragraphs belong together and where the argument shifts to a new run of paragraphs.

Just doing that will lead them to make an educated guess about what they can expect to learn — a speculative summary, so to speak, which can be tested and refined after further reading.  In the majority of cases, you will find them producing a reasonable first-draft summary before reading more deeply.

Again, this is best done with all the pages in full view — which, at least for longer pieces, can only be achieved with an unrolled display.  As the students decide on paragraph groupings, encourage them to encircle them in pencil.  Marking helps students clarify their thinking.

The marking strategy that I developed — textmapping (see photo, above) — is a very simple and powerful way of breaking down texts into their logical parts, and is a great aid for teaching summarization.