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Summarizing skills are essential in an academic setting due to the frequency of summary assignments, the potential for using summarizing as a study aid, and the need for these skills in more complex assignments involving the incorporation of source material in original discourse. Yet summarizing is a highly complex, recursive reading-writing activity involving constraints that can impose an overwhelming cognitive load on students, thereby adversely affecting performance. External constraints include such factors as purpose and audience of the assignment, features of the assignment itself, discourse community conventions, nature of the material to be summarized, time constraints, and the working environment. Internal constraints consist of L2 proficiency, content schemata, affect, formal schemata, cognitive skills, and metacognitive skills. This paper provides an overview of these constraints in relation to summarizing, and suggests pedagogical approaches to mediating the cognitive load.
Kirkland et al. (Tue,) studied this question.