Scaffolding Summary Writing through the ‘Reading to Learn’ Pedagogy

Summary writing is a core competency for students pursuing university studies, but the demands of the reading-to-writing process can be fraught for those students new to the university context, particularly international students for whom English is an additional language. This paper reports on a study that investigated the effectiveness of using the Reading to Learn (R2L) pedagogy for students’ summary writing in an online environment. International English as an additional language students enrolled in four separate iterations of an advanced academic literacy unit offered by an Australian university, and were taught academic reading and summary writing online using the R2L pedagogy. Pre- and post-tests were administered in the first and last weeks of the unit each trimester. In the weeks between the tests, tutorials (2 h×9 weeks) consisted of structured and scaffolded teacher–student interactions, which guided the students through reading and summarising and moved from a high level of teacher input to greater student independence in the reading-to-writing process. Results found significant improvement in students’ abilities to comprehend and summarise key ideas from a source text and to write grammatically sound and complex sentences. However, the instruction did not show any impact on cohesion, vocabulary or punctuation. Despite the limitations of the study, the results confirm previous results as to the value of R2L, which provides a scaffolded approach to reading and writing.