The study investigated if teaching summarizing skills could improve the summary skills of Korean EFL university students. This study involved 38 university freshmen in a required English course and were randomly chosen as the control and experimental groups. The experimental group was taught through summarizing rules, while the control group was engaged in other lessons during the intervention period. The students’ summaries were analyzed as to how effectively the participants paraphrased and integrated the main ideas, the major supporting details, and accurate information from source text into their summaries. The results show that a significant instruction effect was observed in the summary writing performance of the experimental group, in identifying main ideas and major details and paraphrasing and integrating ideas, compared to the control group, which showed a significant change between the first and second summaries only on the accuracy measure. The results are also supported by the questionnaire on students’ perceptions of the instruction.

This study aimed to investigate characteristics of English summary skills of Korean college freshmen. To achieve this aim, 120 English summary writings were collected from an English diagnostic test for college freshmen. Two texts with different features were used for the test. Text A is a persuasive essay with a problem/solution structure, and Text B is an expository essay with a collective structure. Fifty-three students summarized Text A and the others Text B. For each of the text groups, students were classified into two groups by their summary level. In the analysis of the writings considering the genre of the original text, organization, and adherence to summarization rules, it was found that the learners summarized the persuasive essay better than the expository essay. The high-ability group used various transition words and followed the structure of the original text when they organized their writings. As for summarization rules such as invention, selection, and paraphrasing, Text A group did not show any difference in their creation skill of topic sentence between the high- and low-ability group. On the other hand, the high-ability group that read Text B was better at creating general sentences than the low group. There was not a significant difference between the high- and low-ability groups in their paraphrasing skills, Text A group in general performing better than Text B group. Further suggestions and pedagogical implications are discussed.

L1 and L2 summaries written by Korean university students in an EFL writing class were studied to determine the causes of instances of “plagiarism.” Summaries in both L1 and L2 were evaluated holistically along with seven essays in L2. It was found that more proficient writers in L1 and L2 tend to demonstrate less Reliance on the Source Text1); and a good amount of Reliance was also present in L1 as well as L2, suggesting that L2 interference is not the only cause of Reliance. These findings indicate a relation between Reliance on the Source text and writing ability both in L1 and L2. Moreover, a closer look at instances of Reliance often revealed efforts by the writers to integrate source text material into their own texts, though these attempts often seemed like “plagiarism” to writing teachers. However, Reliance in these cases may not be plagiarism per se from students’ point of view. The results are expected to help teachers understand the causes and nature of students’Reliance on the Source text in the writing instruction.