DESIGNING INTEGRATED ONLINE EXERCISES FOR ADVANCED
SECOND-LANGUAGE USERS OF ENGLISH TO PRACTISE SUMMARISING TECHNICAL SUBJECT CONTENT

Angela P Cheater
School of Business
Macao Polytechnic Institute
Macao SAR China

Effective summarising is not intuitive: it requires practising specifically-taught skills in an integrated process of reading, comprehending, note-taking, planning and writing (Johns 1988; Juan & Palmer 1998). For advanced EFL English students successfully to integrate these skills, detailed and nuanced online auto-feedback would be very useful, using a mixed collection of the auto-summarising technology that has been developed over the past decade (Endres-Niggemeyer 2000; Franzke & Streeter 2006; Sparck Jones 2007). Preliminary design thoughts are offered here, following diagnostic findings on difficulties faced by advanced EFL students in reading comprehension prior to summarising.

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