Summarization strategies used in the summaries of English narrative and descriptive texts by the second semester students of the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya

In learning many lessons at schools and universities, many students complain that they cannot follow the lessons that are given by their teachers. Some university students, especially, also complain that when there is an exam, they cannot memorize all the information in the textbook because there is too much information contained in it. Other students even do not know what to memorize from the book since they don’t know which part is very important. To overcome this problem, many teachers suggest that the students make a summary. When they have to read a book, they have to jot down important parts that they should remember from the book. The problem now is that the teachers never teach them how to make a good summary. They never give specific guidelines about writing a summary. As the result, the students have various strategies in writing a summary. In this study, the writer conducted a study to find out the strategies, which are used in the students’ summaries. The schemata theory mentions the importance of schemata in assisting someone to write, so omeone will get ideas to write from reading. Meanwhile, the macro structure theory explains about the use of the theory to determine the relation among sentences in one discourse topic. By writing a summary, students can gain information that can activate schemata and write only important parts which can support the topic of the summary. In conducting this study, the writer used a narrative text entitled “Night Watch” and a descriptive one entitled “Flour Sack.” Those two texts were given to the second semester students of the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya to be summarized. They were given time around one hour to summarize one text and the texts were given in two different meetings. Their summaries became the data of this study to find out the strategies they used in writing the summaries. From the data it was found out that the students use preservation and deletion as the strategies in the summaries. However, some of them preserved main ideas that actually should be deleted and there are also some of them who deleted main ideas that should be preserved actually. Most of them, who used the preservation preferred verbatim to paraphrase as the strategies in writing their summaries. After discussing the findings, then the writer predicted some causes of the findings. The writer concluded generally, that most of the summaries were not good enough and unacceptable since they have never been taught about how to write a summary before. Additionally, they were very dependent on the text since many of them wrote the sentence in verbatim and could not make their own sentences. Additionally, they could not interpret the the topic sentence and the main idea, which were stated implicitly. Therefore, the writer suggests that summarization strategies can be used as an alternative to teach writing and to improve the students’ writing skill