Empowering Thai University Students to Cope with English Texts Using Outlines and Summaries

Abstract

Thai university students still need help with reading. Generally, many students tend to read word by word or sentence by sentence; they do not pay attention to reading strategies such as reference, transition, text organization and so on, which would help enhance their comprehension. Many of them find it difficult to separate main ideas from supporting details, and cannot summarize and communicate what they have read either verbally or in writing. The author has tried to find ways to increase her students’ reading ability, and found that an effective approach is to write a summary from an outline. Conducting an action research in a reading class, she found that this method improved the students’ performance in their reading comprehension tests.

Keywords: Outlining, summarizing, reading comprehension