This study explored the effects of outlining on the summaries of thirty six L2 college students across three text genres and their opinions on the use of outlining in writing the summaries. Over the eight weeks, the students were divided into an outlining group (experimental group) and a keyword group (controlled group) wrote three summaries after reading articles across three genres (e.g. argumentative, expository, and narrative) at two weeks intervals. Additionally, a follow-up questionnaire on the use of outlining in writing summaries was conducted. Data were analyzed by the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010) under 14 indices, and the responses to the questionnaire were analyzed by percentages. The results found a statistically significant difference appearing only in the aspect of CT (i.e. clause per T-unit). In addition, a majority of students utilizing outlining for summary writing believed that they were helped not only to understand the contents and the structure of the articles, but to write summaries with their own words. These results have a pedagogical meaning in that outlining can be more efficient for specific reading genres when teaching summarization in L2 classes.

This paper focuses on how to retell a story for different target readers/ audiences. When retelling/rewriting a given story, various strategies are involved. Adjusting syntactic complexity is one of the various factors when a story is to be retold. This paper investigates what strategies are involved in order to adjust the syntactic complexity, by analyzing three versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Simply counting the number of complex sentences such as relative clauses, for example, would not be an appropriate way of measuring syntactic complexity. Based on the investigation results reported on in this paper, we found that a storyteller and/or a reteller of a story considers various factors including linguistic complexity, cognitive development, parsing ability, cultural background, as well as other reading- related experiences.