Summarizing or making a summary can be a tiresome activity for either students or avid readers. However, the ability to do so reflects how well the readers understand a writing piece. In fact, summarizing helps a reader retain the knowledge or message being conveyed by the writer after he or she reads the material. In addition, summaries made will help readers locate ideas about the text without having to re-read the whole material. 

In this post, there are several strategies of how to summarize, they are as follows:

Reading can be viewed as a dynamic activity that produces meaningful knowing. Each of you can read well if you have the patience and determination to do so. In this post, you will find activities that can assist you in understanding any reading material you will encounter.

Many language textbooks emphasize more on product (answers to comprehension questions) than process (using reading skills and strategies to understand the text), providing little or no contextual information about the reading selections or their authors, and few if any pre-reading activities. Newer textbooks may provide pre-reading activities and reading strategy guidance, but their one-size-fits-all approach may or may not be appropriate for your students. 
There are some guidelines for developing reading activities which can serve as starting points for evaluating and adapting textbook reading activities. 

• Use existing, or add your own, pre-reading activities and reading strategy practice as appropriate for your students. 
• Don’t make students do exercises simply because they are in the book; this destroys motivation.
• Another problem with textbook reading selections is that they have been adapted to a predetermined reading level through adjustment of vocabulary, grammar, and sentence length. This makes them more immediately approachable, but it also means that they are less authentic and do not encourage students to apply the reading strategies they will need to use outside of class. When this is the case, use the textbook reading selection as a starting point to introduce a writer or topic, and then give students choices of more challenging authentic texts to read as a follow-up.

Using Reading Strategies

Language instructors are often frustrated by the fact that students do not automatically transfer the strategies they use when reading in their native language to reading in a language they are learning. Instead, they seem to think reading means starting at the beginning and going word by word, stopping to look up every unknown vocabulary item, until they reach the end. When they do this, students are relying exclusively on their linguistic knowledge, a bottom-up strategy. One of the most important functions of the language instructor, then, is to help students move past this idea and use top-down strategies as they do in their native language.
Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their reading behaviour to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and reading purposes. They help students develop a set of reading strategies and match appropriate strategies to each reading situation. Strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively include

Some teachers find it difficult to deal with reading texts found in their coursebooks. Mostly, they will just go with the rest of the exercise accompanying the texts. There are actually some activities which can make a reading activity more fun or more meaningful to students. They are:

“Reading furnishes our mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” – John Locke


Questions to ask yourself about Textbook Reading:

• Do I preview a chapter – introductions, headings, summary, key terms?
• Do I know what kind of test I am studying for so I know to look for specific and general details?
• Do I find meaning of terms used in concepts or theory in the text?
• Do I take notes or make annotations in my textbook so I know what to come back to later?

This book is a collection of reading games and activities for intermediate to advanced students of English. The activities in this book all require the reading of a text and the communication of information it contains, sometimes in order to solve a puzzle or complete a task, sometimes in order to do a role-play.