What+is+summarising?

**Summarising** aids comprehension. When you **summarise**, you reduce a **text** to its bare essentials by understanding and putting what you have read into your own words. You summarise constantly as you read, sorting out significant ideas and events and other bits and pieces of information. Summarising provides a shortened version of another’s text that includes all of the main points of the original, but reduces the detail of the original text by pulling it back to its essence. When teaching summarising to your students, make sure that you Why Summarise? ** When students are taught how to summarise they improve their ability to distil the text into key elements, and comprehend the content, structure and style of a text. Students comprehend a text by connecting the new information they are gathering as readers with their own knowledge bank.
 * keep the main points of the text;
 * delete unimportant ideas;
 * maintain the author’s point of view;
 * sequence the information logically
 * Summarising ** is not an easy thing to do. It is one of the hardest strategies for students to grasp and one of the hardest strategies for you to teach.

How Does Summarising Help Students Comprehend Text?
This module provides examples of how you can give your secondary students opportunities to **summarise** by repeated modeling, working together and giving your students ample time to practice. Effective teaching of comprehension takes careful planning and good management on your part. The program needs to be interesting and include a flexible use of a range of instructional practices to ensure you meet the learning needs of your students. With careful organization you will be able to monitor your students' progress, demonstrate new comprehension strategies, work with the whole class, in small groups and with individual students while still allowing time for independent practice.
 * By learning to omit unnecessary items, summarising allows students to focus on the main points of the text.
 * Summarising helps students establish in their own minds what they think the text is actually saying.
 * Good summarisation allows deeper knowledge of what students have read.
 * Instructional Practices Summary **

** Guiding Principles Summary ** Your **teaching of comprehension** is more likely to be most effective if you have high expectations, inform students about purposes for learning and allow time for your students to practice and reflect on how to use the strategies to improve comprehension. You will need to maintain ongoing assessment and routinely demonstrate the use of reading across all learning and curriculum areas and explicitly show the strategies proficient readers use to make meaning. By providing opportunities to discuss texts, supporting, guiding and encouraging your students and allowing daily opportunities for them to read independently, your students will develop an understanding of the structure and features of texts, build upon prior learning and make connections between what they know and what they are reading.


 * Reference: Di Snowball - Reading Comprehension Strategies Years 5-8 **