Improving Summarizing and Reflecting Skills for First-Year English Linguistics Majored Students through Reading Assignments

With a view to developing students’ ability to comprehend and summarize information from different sources as well as write about accounts of experiences in simple connected texts, two reading assignments are administered to first-year English majored students in a university in Ha Noi during the first semester. Throughout 15 academic weeks, the students are provided with such sub-skills as identifying main ideas, taking notes, outlining, paraphrasing and reflecting. This study is conducted with two main objectives (a) introducing the procedure of implementing each reading assignment and (b) identifying and improving students’ weaknesses in summarizing and reflecting skills. The study employed the quantitative and qualitative methods with document analysis as the main research instrument. A total of 116 reading assignments were collected from 02 classes and then were assessed on the basis of the published marking rubrics. The findings have proved to be of practical value in helping students realize their weaknesses in summarizing and reflecting skills in addition to improving their performance in the reading assignments.