A Summary Writing Model Based on Van Dijk’s Concept of Macrostructure and its Application within the Genre-Based Approach

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

Elnaz shoari ¹ , Nader Assadi Aidinlou ^{2 *} , Hanieh Davatgari Asl ³

1 - PhD Candidate in TEFL, Department of English Language Teaching, Ahar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahar, Iran
2 - Assistant Professor in TEFL, Department of English Language Teaching, Ahar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahar, Iran
3 - Assistant Professor in TEFL, Department of English Language Teaching, Ahar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahar, Iran

Accepted : 2019-09-18 Published : 2019-04-01

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Abstract :

This study was an attempt to provide a comprehensive model for summary writing based on the model of Van Dijk’s concept of macrostructures. The effectiveness of the model was examined in a genre-based quasi-experimental study with the data collection procedure lasting a semester. The participants included 60 female English learners divided into two experimental and control groups. The results of the study revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the posttest which was mainly due to the potential role the treatment had in increasing the learners’ structural awareness in order to help them find the most important parts of the texts, i.e. those relating to the main idea of the text and disregard the less relevant ones. The results of this study contributed to the understanding of the genre-based model and that English learners could get the essence of a given text by only understanding the gist and comprehending some sentences in a text. English learners could realize that all of the words and sentences in a text have a responsibility of conveying a particular message and that there is no need to memorize or remember every individual information in a text.