Investigating the Third Year Students’ Summary Writing Ability at English Education Program of Jember University

Abstract

Writing skill is important for students’ academic especially for English department students. Unfortunately, writing skill is categorized as the most difficult skills among the others since it requires intense and active thinking. That is why, students need a lot of practice to master writing skills. One of the activities that can be used to practice writing skills is summary writing. Summary writing is an activity when students’ write a shortened version of text that still contains the whole text. Representing other people’s ideas with your own words is considered as a frightening task for students who lack of vocabulary. Students tend to just copy the words from the original text. Thus, summary writing can be used as an indicator to know students’ writing ability. Dealing to the problem that is explained above, this research was conducted to describe the third year students’ summary writing ability at the English education program of Jember University through five aspects of summary writing which were length, accuracy, paraphrasing, focus, and conventions. The design of this research was descriptive design. The population of this research was the third year students at the English education program of the faculty of teacher training and education of Jember University in 2017/2018 academic year. Using simple random sampling 15% of the population were taken as the participants of the research. Thus, there were 16 out of 103 students taken as the participants. In this research, there were two data collection methods used to obtain the data; those were writing test and documentation. After all the data were obtained, then the researcher did 8 steps in analyzing the data. Those were, scoring the result of the summary writing test, calculating the average scores from from the first rater and the second rater, finding the general mean score, classifying the score achieved, analyzing the students’ achievements and the scores using percentage, stating which aspects of summary writing that are highly and poorly achieved by the students. The result of the research showed that the students’ summary writing ability was categorized as fair. It was supported from the result of calculation which revealed that the students’ mean score was 68.6. To be more specific, 1 student was categorized as excellent, 6 students were categorized as good, 7 students were categorized as fair, 2 students were categorized as poor, and no one was categorized as fail. Meanwhile, the analysis about the students’ summary writing ability in the five aspects of summary writing showed that the length, accuracy, and paraphrasing were the aspects that showed the students’ strengths in summary writing, because those aspects came up with high percentages. On the contrary, the aspect of focus and convention were considered as the aspects that reflected the students’ weaknesses in summary writing because the aspects showed low percentages compared to the other aspects. Since the length aspect came up with the highest percentage which was 26%, it can be indicated that the length aspect was the aspect that the students’ highly achieved. Meanwhile, the convention aspect which only came up with 12% was indicated as the aspect that the students struggled the most Therefore, the researcher hopes that the new findings about the students’ summary writing ability can be advantageous for the students to improve their summary writing ability by figuring out the information about students’ strengths and weaknesses in summary writing. Also, hopefully this research can help the students to find a way to overcome their difficulties. Besides, it is also expected for the future researchers who will conduct a research with the same interest, to apply different method in analyzing students’ summary writing ability, for example they can apply rubric that also can focus on summary’s organization and vocabulary