Reinvestment of texts, language knowledge and strategies
Reinvestment is the Québec ESL competency usually worded as reinvesting understanding of texts: taking ideas, information, and language from texts you have read or heard and using them for a new purpose. The exam might give you two short texts and ask for a synthesis, or ask you to carry an article's ideas into a letter, a debate, or a creative piece.
What reinvestment requires
- Summary in your own words - the gist, not a reproduction of the original.
- Selection - you choose what is relevant to the new task and drop the rest.
- Comparison - you show where sources agree and where they diverge.
- Attribution - you signal whose idea is whose: According to…, X argues that…, while Y points out…
- Transformation - an article becomes a letter to the editor; a short story becomes a diary entry from a secondary character; survey data becomes a paragraph.
Paraphrase, don't patchwrite
Read the passage, close it, write your version from memory, then check it against the original. Change structure and vocabulary together. Keep a quotation only when the exact wording matters, and put it in quotation marks.
Organizing before writing
A three-column chart - source / main claim / evidence - lets you see the disagreement quickly. Use a Venn diagram for two texts with overlapping positions. Write the synthesis from the chart, not from the texts lying side by side.
Worked example
Text A argues homework builds discipline and study habits. Text B argues homework widens inequality because not every student has a quiet space or a parent who can help. Synthesis: Both authors accept that homework has effects beyond the assignment itself; they disagree about whether those effects are beneficial. A stresses the habit of sustained effort, whereas B focuses on unequal conditions at home. On the evidence given, B's argument is stronger on fairness, but A's would be stronger if schools provided supervised homework time. Reasoning: the first sentence names the shared premise, the second states the disagreement, and the third evaluates. The common failure - summarizing A, then summarizing B, with no link between them - is avoided.
Traps
- Copying phrases and changing one word: this is still plagiarism.
- Summarizing each source in sequence without comparing them.
- Distorting a source's position to make your own point easier.
- Adding personal opinion that never connects back to the texts.
- Losing track of who said what when two authors are close in view.