ИСТИНА

The objective of the presentation is to introduce the importance of teaching high school pupils to make a sound academic summary based on audiotexts. The following questions will be answered: -What is an academic summary as a result of the process of rendering an audiotext? -What determines the importance of teaching academic summarizing of audiotexts in particular? -What is the difference between summarizing an academic text and any other text? Moreover, certain methodological guidelines will be given on how to teach pupils to write a proper summary and on how to evaluate the texts created by students. To begin with, it must be said that now new standards of higher education are being developed. As one of the directions of this work a special committee was created in MSU, following the order issued 21 May, 2010. Its aim has been to devise a special educational course that would contribute to the university graduates’ so called “academic competence”, which implies knowing how to prepare scientific publications, discussions, presentations etc. In the conclusions derived by the committee it’s pointed out that being able to analyze and present the obtained data, to estimate properly the works in the chosen research area and reason logically are of vital importance. Teaching audiotexts’ summarizing will undoubtedly help to start developing these skills in high school pupils as well make them prepared for studying at university. If a person is able to summarise the information of lectures and seminars properly, he/ she obviously avoids a significant amount of stress that first year students inevitably face. Furthermore, almost every situation in the process of studying implies an element of rendering an audiotext. Listening to lectures or participating in seminars, students have to be able to listen and understand, to make notes, to ask and answer questions, to present the results of their work etc. Writing an academic text (an essay/ a report/ a course or diploma paper), one has to be able to write a proper draft, to structure and write the text obeying all the norms of academic writing in a particular language culture. Teaching academic audiotexts’ summarising contributes significantly to developing the above mentioned skills. In brief, academic summarizing is a form of picking out information which enables a specialist to choose the required facts fast. The essence of this process is presenting the most significant ideas of an original text in a concise, coherent and cohesive way. Analysis and synthesis are in the core of this process. To make a good summary students could stick to the following order of steps: -listening to the text for the first time to get its overall idea; -listening to the text for the second time (if this option is available), making notes of all the significant details; -spreading the information into 3 groups: to be fully represented in the summary, to be touched upon, to be omitted; -pointing out the key idea of each paragraph thus making a logical plan of the summary; -compiling the summary itself following certain rules (structure: introduction, main part, conclusion). When evaluating the final result a teacher should consider whether a student’s summary contains grammar and vocabulary mistakes; whether it is logically structured and covers all the main points of the original text. The size of a summary and its stylistic consistency are to be estimated as well.