The Effect of Source-Use Strategies on Summary Completion in IELTS Academic Reading

Learning source-use strategies can affect summarizing and reading comprehension in many ways. This study examined the effect of paraphrasing, patch writing, and discourse synthesis on summary completion in the IELTS academic reading test. Participants were ۶۰ female and male upper-intermediate Iranian English language learners at a language institute in Karaj, Iran, all of them having previously taken the IELTS academic test and achieved ۵.۵ to ۶ at the start of the study. Random assignment was used to place them into three groups. Two IELTS academic reading mock tests were given to the participants as the pretest and the posttest, and one-way analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA) was used to compare the outcomes. The findings indicated that the group using paraphrasing techniques demonstrated a notably superior performance compared to the patch writing group, the discourse synthesis group, and the control group. Moreover, paraphrasing, as a source-use skill, assisted students to achieve a higher score in the IELTS academic reading test. Implications for test takers are discussed.

کلیدواژه ها:

discourse synthesis ، IELTS academic reading test ، paraphrasing ، patch writing ، summarizing