TRAINING SPECIALIST TURKISH TEACHERS: ARE WE READY TO SOLVE PROBLEMS OF LANGUAGE SKILLS?

The aim of this study is to determine the Turkish teacher candidates` solution offers to the problems of language skill developments that they may face during their teaching experience. We decided to do a qualitative research as this study aims to assign the knowledge and the awareness of teachers candidates of language skill development. Thus we decided to do a case study research. It is chosen maximum variation sampling. For this purpose, we took 15 participants who are the 4th grade students from the Faculty of Education, Turkish Language Teaching Department of Gazi University (Ankara) and Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University (Çanakkale) in 2011-2012 spring term. In this study, interviews were used for data collection. Interview questions are based on the language skills. As one of the most remarkable results of the study, we can say that the teacher candidates do not have enough awareness about reading, listening, speaking and writing problems. It has also been observed that there is lack of knowledge on the stages like recognizing, defining and solving the problem. In addition to these findings, it is seen that the teacher candidates tried to give proper answers at the moment of the interview because they had not thought that students may have cognitive problems with the language skills. We can easily say that these are the results of handling courses more theoretical and giving less importance to the exercises of comprehension and narration techniques in the courses. According to the results of the study, it is revealed that to make inquiries about the quality of the courses on the proficiency area is needed. This result requires improving the quality of these courses.