How to use summarization skills in elementary Chinese novel unit teaching to enhance students' organizing and inquiry abilities

Context: Traditional Chinese teaching, emphasizes knowledge transmission over literacy cultivation, teacher lectures over student construction, and single-passage teaching over group text integration. The unified textbook's "Novel Unit" uses a dual-thread framework to integrate Chinese elements, but in teaching practice, it is often limited by mechanical element breakdown and fails to activate higher-order thinking. This study used the summarization skills of the "Think-Talk-Toolbox”, to guide students to extract common textual patterns, enabling students to construct knowledge graphs of novel issues through dialogue Aims: This study sought to verify the effectiveness of elements of the "Think-Talk-Toolbox” (TTT), in novel unit teaching. Students were encouraged to grasp the characteristics and internal connections of the three elements of novels, simultaneously enhancing their abilities in text organization, inquiry, and creative expression. Methods: This study used two rounds of action research to embed the strategies for summarizing skills S1-S4 into dialogue tasks and used case analysis to analyse students' changes in summarizing skills, summarizing their role and effectiveness in improving students' novel sorting and inquiry abilities. Students’understanding of the novel's content, grasp of the three elements of the novel, and the improvement of their creative abilities, was analysed to triangulate the effectiveness of teaching strategies. Results: By systematically applying the skill of "summarizing," students' cognition and creative abilities in novel genre have improved. When analysing texts, they can accurately extract the main plotline of the novel and clearly grasp the three elements of the novel and their interdependent and influential internal relationships. In micro-fiction writing, 85% of students could design stories around core plots and fully consider the relationships among "characters," "plot," and "environment" within the novel. Implications: The strategies identified in this study are suitable for transfer to teaching other similar texts, providing a replicable model for primary school Chinese novel instruction. TTT has the potential to promoting deep learning in Chinese and drive the transformation of knowledge into literacy.

Keywords

Chinese language teaching, fiction writing, summarization skills, inquiry skills, action research

Permanent link to cite this item

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14069/1467

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Primary School Affiliated to Northeast Normal University 东北师范大学附属小学