Summary: Strategies for Ensuring Loyalty

The article concerns the strategies used to organize learning in order to form and develop the students’ competence of summarizing a piece of narrative fiction as closely to the original text as possible: questioning, graphic representation, building an outline, identifying and saving compulsory words, and eliminating inoperative words. These strategies refer to two directions from which the text may be approached: ensuring content faithfulness and ensuring vocabulary faithfulness. Each of the two strategies concerns the intellectual operations the student needs to learn to perform and the organization of the community of learners, as well as the quality of the final product: the writing of the summary. The signs of faithfulness are found in: (a) the precise presentation of actors and events; (b) their placement in time and location; (c) the correct sequence of events; (d) the correct interpretation of relationships; (e) a vocabulary in agreement with the original text; (f) the grammatical concordance of the summary with the peculiarities of the original text.