The evaluation of summarizing strategies of the primary school 5th grade students and teachers: Turkish lesson example

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.Summarizing should be learnt and used by the students who are in formal educational process since they meet with great deal of information in many fields. Summarizing is a strategy that will ease remembrance of that information. Moreover, this strategy should be taught to students by teachers. Therefore, this research aims to ascertain the similarities and differences between the summarizing strategies of the primary school 5th grade students and their classroom teachers in terms of writing summaries and the summarizing strategies while they are writing summaries of different types of texts. In the direction of this general aim, both the qualitative and the quantitative data have been collected simultaneously. For this reason, the method of the research is the mixed method. The study group of the research has been determined by criterion sampling method and it is composed of 561 primary school 5th grade students and 17 class teachers of them. In the research, the following have been used as research tools all of which have been developed by the researcher: Summary Evaluation Form for Narrative Texts, Summary Evaluation Form for Expository Texts, Reading Comprehension Test, Semi-Structured Student Interview Form and Semi-Structured Teacher Interview Form. In the analysis of the data, for the quantitative data frequency, percentage, correlation analysis and t-test have been used while for the qualitative data content analysis has been done. The results of the research are as follows:The students are more successful in summarizing the narrative texts than the expository texts and while writing the summaries of those texts they have used the summarizing strategies more in the narrative texts than the expository texts.There are meaningful differences between the points they got from the reading comprehension and the summary evaluation form.High level of correlation has been determined on the grades between the narrative texts parts of the reading comprehension tests and summarizing strategies that used upon narrative texts. Indermediate level of correlation has been determined between the grades taken from the reading comprehensionKey Words: Reading comprehension, reading comprehension strategies, summarizing, summarizing strategies.