Summarizing is one of the most powerful skills we can teach in speech therapy. However, it’s also one that many students struggle with. Research consistently shows that summarizing improves overall comprehension, supports information recall, and boosts academic performance across content areas (National Reading Panel, 2000; Duke & Pearson, 2002).
In this post, we’ll explore six evidence-based strategies that help students understand what a summary is, identify key details, and generate their own summaries with confidence. These strategies align beautifully with structured literacy principles and are easy to implement using the materials inside the SLP Now Membership.
If you want to follow along with ready-made visuals, passages, sentence frames, and photo scenes, you can access the Summarizing Skill Pack inside the membership.
👉 Not a member yet? Grab 5 free downloads here: slpnow.com/trial
How to Target Summarizing
1. Explicitly Teach What a Summary Is (and What It Isn’t)
Before students can summarize effectively, they need clear, student-friendly definitions of:
📖 Summary
📖 Main idea
📖 Key details
Students often rely on ineffective rules of thumb (e.g., “the main idea is the first sentence”), which can lead to inaccurate or incomplete responses. Research shows that explicit teaching of comprehension strategies, including summarizing, significantly improves reading outcomes (Duke & Pearson, 2002).
Try This:
Use a visual metaphor, like an umbrella, to show how the main idea “covers” or connects key details. This concrete, repeatable teaching point helps students internalize the concept.
The Summarizing Skill Pack inside the membership includes a teaching visual to help you break this down for students.
2. Use Graphic Organizers to Build Understanding
Graphic organizers make abstract concepts concrete, especially for students with language needs. Research supports their use for improving comprehension, recall, and organization of information (Kim et al., 2004).
Two helpful formats include:
📖 Main idea at the top → Key details below
📖 Graphic organizers with integrated sentence frames
These tools help students identify the structure of a text and prepare them for generating oral or written summaries.
The Summarizing Skill Pack inside the membership includes multiple graphic organizers.
3. Model Your Thinking (Metalinguistic Talk)
Students benefit from hearing an adult’s internal thought process, a strategy rooted in explicit thinking-aloud instruction (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995).
This helps students understand:
📖 How to identify main ideas
📖 How to filter out non-essential information
📖 How to compare possible summaries
Using simple texts or picture scenes at first reduces cognitive load and makes the strategy more accessible.
4. Start With Pictures Before Moving to Text
Pictures remove the decoding barrier, allowing students to focus on idea-level comprehension. Visuals have strong research support in improving narrative and expository language skills (Ukrainetz, 2015).
You might:
📖 Show a photo scene
📖 Provide possible main ideas
📖 Discuss which key details support each option
This supports the gradual release process and sets students up for success with written passages.
The Summarizing Skill Pack inside the membership includes picture scenes to practice summarizing before diving into a text.
5. Use Sentence Frames to Teach Summary Structure
Sentence frames help students understand how to say a summary. They also reduce linguistic load so students can focus on content rather than syntax.
Examples might include:
📖 “The main idea is ___ because ___.”
📖 “The text is mostly about ___ and includes details such as ___, ___, and ___.”
Sentence frames are supported in literacy research as a way to scaffold academic language and improve expressive outcomes (Fisher & Frey, 2014).
In the Summarizing Skill Pack, these frames are already embedded into the graphic organizers so students can smoothly transition from identifying information to producing a summary.
6. Teach Text Structures Explicitly
Text structure instruction is one of the most evidence-supported ways to improve summarizing and comprehension (Williams et al., 2005).
Common nonfiction text structures include:
📖 Description
📖 Sequence
📖 Cause/Effect
📖 Problem/Solution
📖 Compare/Contrast
Knowing the structure helps students anticipate what matters most and what is simply “extra” information.
If a passage is cause/effect, for example, your graphic organizer and sentence frames will shift accordingly.
Bring It All Together
When we combine explicit instruction, visuals, modeling, graphic organizers, sentence frames, and instruction of text structure, students gain a comprehensive framework for summarizing. These strategies help them move from surface-level retellings to meaningful, efficient summaries that reflect deeper comprehension.
If you want ready-made materials to support these strategies (including photo scenes, student-friendly definitions, leveled passages, and scaffolded organizers) explore the Summarizing Skill Pack inside the SLP Now Membership.
👉 Get started with the Summary Skill Pack and 5 free therapy plan downloads at slpnow.com/trial!
References
Duke, N. K., & Pearson, P. D. (2002). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension.
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2014). Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning.
Kim, A.-H., Vaughn, S., Wanzek, J., & Wei, S. (2004). Graphic organizers and their effects on the reading comprehension of students with LD. Journal of Learning Disabilities.
National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction.
Pressley, M., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading.
Ukrainetz, T. A. (2015). Contextualized Language Intervention: Scaffolding PreK–12 Literacy Achievement.
Williams, J. P., Hall, K. M., & Lauer, K. D. (2005). Teaching expository text structure to young at-risk learners. Journal of Educational Psychology.
