A transdisciplinary practice, the text summary serves as a tool for communication in many social and professional situations, beyond the educational milieu. A complex language practice, situated at the crossroads of reading and writing, text summarization requires analysis and synthesis at the same time; it also calls for reasoning, intellectual rigor and critical thinking. To learn to summarize is to learn to process information in such a way that it can be condensed and re-used. Thus the competency to summarize a text is also a methodological one. The text summarization skill is best learned through an emphasis on precise and targeted analysis of the functioning of the source text; this is what underpins the equivalence at two levels – informative and pragmatic – that is at the core of the summarization process. It is honed as well through successive reformulations of the initial summary, with a view to fine-tuning and improving it. The text summarizing skill also improves through an approach to the practice itself in which the grasp of the subject is both broader and deeper. On the one hand, it circumscribes the learning object that the text summary constitutes; on the other, it identifies precisely the methodological approach that underlies the summarizing activity – that is, the process itself. This dual approach to the summarizing process calls upon oral communication: oral interactions are occasioned by performing the act, but there is also oral reflection (discussion of the process) and oral knowledge-building; in short, oral communication builds a context for the summarizing activity and enables the learner to gain greater ownership of the process.