The impact of note-taking, peer feedback, and automated feedback on summary writing: A study in the Japanese EFL context

Abstract

Summary writing can be challenging for Japanese EFL learners, who tend to have difficulty with over-copying from source texts, reaching appropriate lengths, and choosing information for inclusion. This study reports on three interventions taken in tandem in an academic writing class: note-taking, peer feedback, and automated feedback. The results suggest that combining these interventions into process-writing-based practice effectively enhanced students’ summary writing ability; text-length and content scores increased from a pre- to post-test and the amount of source text copying decreased. Furthermore, we found that students who had higher language ability and more of a tendency to over-copy initially were more likely to improve. Finally, students reported that they preferred the automated feedback and the greatest change in learners’ writing was observed after the automated feedback, so we think that plays an important role in improving summary writing ability. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Keywords

• summary writing
• source-based writing
• automated feedback
• peer feedback
• note-taking