Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to determine the extent to which pre-service Turkish Language and Literature teachers possess summarizing skill. Answers to the following questions were sought in the study: What is the summarizing skill level of the pre-service Turkish Language and Literature teachers? Which of the summarizing rules are difficult to apply for the pre-service teachers? The study employed the survey method. The study group consists of 47 students having graduated from the department of Turkish Language and Literature and attending the program of “Pedagogic Formation Course” at MuÄŸla Sıtkı Koçman University in 2014. As data collection instruments, two forms were employed in the study; one of them is Summary Answer Form (SAF) and the other one is Summary Answer Key (SAK). As a result, 96% of the participants were found to have exhibited a medium level or higher summarizing performance (medium 79%; high 17%). The rules that the pr-service teachers were the most successful to apply were “select the main idea sentence” and “delete the unimportant information”. When compared to other summarizing rules, the pre-service teachers were found to be relatively less successful in the selection of one of the repeated pieces of information to be included in the summary.

Key words: Summarizing skill, reading comprehension, summarizing.