IDEA REPRESENTATION AND SUMMARIZING STRATEGIES IN ARTICLE SUMMARIES WRITTEN BY INDONESIAN EFL STUDENTS

Abstract

This study examined idea representation and summarizing strategies in article summaries written by Indonesian EFL students. When the study was conducted, the students were attending a graduate course on “the Teaching of Writing” in the Graduate Program in ELT at State University of Malang, Indonesia. This study describes the students’ article summaries in terms of idea representation based on the ICF (‘introduction,’ ‘content,’ and ‘finalization’) frame and strategies applied in the article summaries. Data in the form of article summaries written by 16 students were collected at the end of the course. The results of data analysis show that most of the Indonesian EFL students could successfully represent the the ideas from the journal articles into their summaries. However, not all of the students consider that ‘finalization’ component in the frame needs to be included in their summaries. In terms of strategies in summarizing, most of the students made summaries by copying ideas and words with no or some modification, whereas only some of them write summaries by using their own expressions. This means that the students found that summarizing is not an easy task. Therefore, this study recommends EFL teachers to teach their students strategies to summarize successfully. It also encourages EFL teachers to remind the students to use their own expressions in their article summaries in order to avoid plagiarism. Keywords: Idea representation; strategies in summarizing; article summaries; journal articles; Indonesian EFL students