Achieve Reading Comprehension through Summary Writing Gao, in the article "The Effect of Summary Writing on Reading Comprehension The Role of Mediation in EFL Classroom" Essay

Achieve Reading Comprehension through Summary Writing Gao, in the article "The Effect of Summary Writing on Reading Comprehension The Role of Mediation in EFL Classroom," emphasizes that reading and summarizing help improve children's reading comprehension. The author explains that learning improves and success is achieved when children become able to summarize information from the material that they have read. Summarizing texts will help to improve the student's vocabulary, and they will have chance to test how they use the new words which they encounter. In addition, summarizing will help students to use their prior knowledge with the newly acquired information. English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students need more mediation, with which the teacher will have to provide more effort. The author refers to some studies which show how more mediation improves the learning and reading comprehension of EFL students. The author states that mediation can be in the form of extra reading materials, visual presentations, and tasks that prove increase EFL students' understanding from the reading materials.
I believe that reading materials are educational for me as a teacher. For the first semester of the school year, I will use various mediations with my EFL students. When we begin our reading and writing activities, I will decide what reading materials are appropriate to give them. I will chose some materials and allocate one hour in each class for EFL students to read. After they finish reading, I will start with a word map activity, in which I will ask them to write one word that they found very important in the reading material on a piece of paper. They will write that word in large print in the center of their paper. After that, I will ask them to think and then write words that relate to the word in the middle and put them anywhere they like, according to importance. For example, if the word which they say is closely related to the first word, I will ask them to write it near the center. And if the word does not have as close relationship with the word at the center, I will ask them to write it farther from the center. After the students finish the word map, I will explain to them how useful the word map is in organizing their thoughts, especially in learning the major topic of a story and the sub-topics. After explaining the importance of the word map, I will ask the children to explain why they chose their specific word to be at the center of their pages and why they chose some of the farther ones. After their explanation, , I will ask the children to write a small paragraph summary of the reading material based on what they understood and based on the word map. After finish the activities mentioned, I am confident that the EFL students will improve their reading comprehension significantly. As I was an ELL student for about a year, I think that this method will be very helpful for the students.