Good Article Review About Achieving Reading Comprehension Through Summary Writing

[University/Institutional Affiliation]
Gao, Yang. “The Effect of Summary Writing on Reading Comprehension: The Role of Mediation in EFL Classroom.” Kent State University, pp. 43-47.
Gao in the article entitled “The Effect of Summary Writing on Reading Comprehension: The Role of Mediation in EFL Classroom” asserts that reading and summarizing helps improve a children’s reading comprehension. Gao explained that learning advances when children are able to summarize information from the material that they have read. Summarizing is helps improve and expand their vocabulary as they have to test how to use the new words that they encounter. Especially, summarizing helps children to incorporate their prior knowledge to the newly acquired information. English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students however need more mediation which the teacher will have to pour in more effort. Gao cited some studies that show how more mediation improves the learning, and reading comprehension of EFL students. Language mediators Gao stated can be in the form of reading material, visual presentation, and tasks to demonstrate their understanding of the reading materials.
I personally think that the material is educational for me as a teacher. For the first semester of the school year, I will have to use various mediations to my EFL students. As we begin our reading and writing activities, I will decide on what reading material to give them. I will allot one class hour for them to read the material I chose. After reading, I will start a word map activity which will allow them to write in a piece of paper one word that is very important in the reading material. They will write that in big font at the center part of their paper. After that, I will ask them to write any word that relates to the word in the middle and put it anywhere they like according to importance. If the word is closely related to the first word, it will be written near the center. The words that have far relationship to the word at the center will be written farther from the center.
After the word map, I will explain to them how useful the word map is in organizing their thoughts especially in deciding about the major topic to the sub topics. After explaining the importance of the word map, the children will explain why they chose a specific word to be at the center. After explaining, the children will be asked to write in a paragraph form the summary of the reading material based on what they understood and based on the word map. After fulfilling the activities mentioned, I am confident that the EFL students will improve a lot.