SUMMARIZING STRATEGIES OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOL 5TH GRADE STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

Main objective of reading is to understand what you read. Some strategies can be used in order to increase the level of reading comprehension. One of those strategies is summarizing. Summarizing is the reader to find the main idea of the text, deduct the unnecessary details from the text and without causing any defect in the flow of ideas in the text and in its structure shortening the text in his/her own wording and with his/her own sentences. While writing a summary, the reader should use some strategies over the original text in order to summarize it. Regardless of their ages and grades, many students write summaries of texts and books they have read. Sometimes, a simple summary written without much care can be a very important comprehension strategy. Therefore, the present study investigated the summaries written by students and their teachers responsible for imparting this skill to the students and the summarization strategies used while writing them. The study was designed as a survey. The study group consists of 561 fifth grade students and their 17 classroom teachers selected from four elementary schools in Ankara. The summaries written by the student and teachers were analyzed against some criteria and their summaries of narrative texts were found to be more successful than those of informative texts. The teachers were found to be more successful than the students in terms of meeting the criteria. When the summarizing strategies used by the students and teachers were compared according to text types, the most commonly used strategy by both the teachers and students in both text types is elimination of redundant information and the strategy they never used is invention.