2 D SKILLS BANK 2.2 Using topic sentences to summarize a text
Refer students to Skills Bank 2.2. Set for individual work. If students took notes in Lesson 2.2, Exercise F, they should use these notes as the basis for this exercise. Encourage students to add extra information or examples to fi ll out the summary.
Tell students to start in class, while you monitor and assist, and fi nish for homework.
DISCOURSE NOTE Paraphrasing and summarizing There are various aspects of paraphrasing and summarizing you might want to discuss with students. Ultimately, the ability to write about someone else’s ideas using your own words – not necessarily those used by the original writer – is crucial to developing your own point of view, which is an implicit goal of all academic writing. This process starts with note-taking, since the work involved here in rewording and summarizing ideas helps us to understand them and to retain them in memory. You might also want to discuss the importance of avoiding plagiarism, which is strongly disapproved of in the academic – as well as the commercial – world.
Closure
Ask students to defi ne some of the medical words from the text on Course Book page 21. Alternatively, give defi nitions of some of the words and ask students to identify the words.
