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 study is to describe the nature of planning as a cognitive writing process in L2 writing. It aims to examine how Korean EFL learners generate ideas and organize them. It also investigates the relationship between planning and the final product. Given a worksheet for planning, 39 university students were asked to write an argumentative essay during class. Based on their planning notes, five brainstorming types were identified: using the prompt/writing the position, mini-outlining, listing, mind mapping and free writing (in the order of frequency). In addition, the dominant use of L1 was found both in the brainstorming and the outlining. It was found that there was no statistically significant correlation between the amount of brainstorming and the quantity and quality of L2 writing. Only the amount of brainstorming in L2 had a statically significant correlation with the quantity of L2 writing (but not with the quality of L2 writing). In the case of outlining, a statistically significant correlation was found between its amount and the quantity of L2 writing. However, no statistically significant correlation was found between the amount of outlining and the L2 writing quality.