The influence of central and secondary underlining in the elaboration of informative summaries

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of the addition of underlining to copies of four articles of Ciência Hoje, for the elaboration of twenty informative summaries produced by five Pedagogy students. The results demonstrated that: a) the percentage of the use of underlined sentences was higher than that for the use of non-underlined sentences; b) the percentage of the use of underlined central sentences was higher than that for the use of underlined secondary sentences; c) the summaries relied predominantly on the strategies of full or partial copying and simple paraphrasing; and, d) the summaries were influenced by the form of the underlining (integral, clausal and lexical). Finally, this paper discusses some implications for researching and teaching with the help of school summaries.