Summary-writing is a threshold ability that students need in order to be able to engage proficiently in academic studies. It is an essential part of EAP programs. Studies show that there exist differences in cognitive processes of experts and apprentice summary writers and that reading comprehension and the quality of summaries can be improved by macro-rules training and promoting learners’ awareness of macro-structure, schema-based and structure-based cues of the text. Taking into consideration the features of EAP learners in China, the paper explores the ways in which summary tasks are applied in EAP programs to improve learners’ reading comprehension and writing ability. Meanwhile, some principles and methods concerning summary task material choice and summary task design as well as its effective teaching are proposed.