Evaluation of the Turkish text types in Turkish course books in primary schools

Abstract

The skill of and responsibility for using the mother language accurately starts in the first grade of the primary school.  In this context, the textbooks of the Turkish language courses have important duties to fulfill.  The texts in the coursebooks, thus, function as the means to demonstrate the students the richness, delicacy, and beauty of the mother tongue in order to provide an awareness and endearment of the language.  Distinguished samples of the Turkish and world literature are operative in raising the students’ awareness of the rules of Turkish, as well as tranforming this awareness into behavior, and later into habits. As a result, it is important for the school textbooks to contain texts which are compatible with the objectives of the curriculum and which have high literary value.  Are the texts which are keys for achieving the fundamental skills and program objectives stated in the curricula of the Turkish language courses in the primary schools (in grades 1-8) by the Turkish Ministry of Education

and which are mentioned in the coursebooks -distributed to the schools by the ministry- actually adequate for meeting these expectations?  In order to evaluate the current situation and improve the quality of Turkish language teaching, the texts need to be analyzed, problems need to be identified and stated, and solutions need to be sought through careful examination and research.

The present study reports on  a descriptive analysis of the Turkish language textbooks (for grades 1-5; 6-8) distributed to the schools by the National Ministry of Education in 2007.  The genre and the quality of the texts have been investigated.  Data have been obtained through document analysis which is one of the qualitative research methods. A total of 237 (144+93) texts have been studied individually with respect to text type and their distribution.  Findings have been reported in frequency tables in addition to samples from the texts, and a discussion of the findings have also been provided.