Challenges in summary writing A case study of Bolgatanga Girls Senior High School

Abstract

Summary writing is basically the reduction of a text that is centred on the salient points of a text and a resulting restatement. It is an activity that is multi-sectoral as it involves an interplay of identification of central ideas, a carefully organized form of a text as well as the capability to combine a brief, concise and a well-connected frame of ideas representing the author’s original thoughts or emotions. Students, for that matter candidates, have battled with this canker which has mostly caused poor performance in their course of climbing the academic ladder. This has precipitated the identification of the different forms of difficulties that learners in the study area faced as they undertook a summary writing task. For this very reason, the study has sought to unearth the challenges confronting final year students in the Bolgatanga Girls Senior High School in the Bolgatanga Municipality in the Upper East Region in the execution of tasks in summarization. The study randomly selected 50 students and 5 English teachers and administered two sets of questionnaire to gather responses. In fact, the challenges in summary writing are as a result of students’ inability to locate central ideas, their lack of comprehension skills, the poor reading habits by students as well as their poor acquisition of vocabulary. All the above are orchestrated by ineffective instruction on the part of teachers.