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.
Description:
A dissertation in the Department of Applied Linguistics,
Faculty of Foreign Languages Education submitted to the
School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the award of the degree of
Master of Education
(Teaching English as a Second Language)
in the University of Education, Winneba
JUNE, 2023
