TURKISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ OPINIONS ON TEACHING WRITING AND STUDENTS’ STORY WRITING SKILLS

This study aims at revealing Turkish-language teachers’ opinions on teaching writing and story writing skills of students, and it is a qualitative research. 10 teachers of Turkish working at three different schools in Cukurova, Yuregir and Seyhan districts of Adana were invited to the study group. Typical case sampling was used to designate the schools. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with the teachers. Among the teachers who were interviewed, 8 were women and 2 were men. In respect to their teaching experience, there were four teachers with 7, 10, 13 and 20 years of experience respectively, and two teachers for each 12, 15, and 16 years of experience. Most of the teachers hold bachelor of art degree in Turkish from different colleges of education. The data retrieved from the interviews were analyzed via NVivo Qualitative Data Analysis Software. Percent agreement of .98 and Kappa coefficient of .89 were found as inter-rater reliability. At the end of the study, it is found that Turkishlanguage teachers find writing as the most difficult skill to improve, and their main objective is to improve structural features in writing. They usually assign one subject to students to write about and more than half of the teachers do not practice preparatory work. It is also found out that teachers think their students mistake fairy tale for story, and they have problems in integrating setting, time and character constituents in their story writing. They also believe that students have problems in applying appropriate writing techniques for set up, conflict and resolution parts of the story. It is discovered that teachers mostly pay attention to content editing of the story and structural features of it. Very few teachers focus on language and expression while most of the teachers provide verbal feedback to students as they are reading their stories aloud. Additionally, it is confirmed that all teachers include one question about written expression skills in their exams while evaluating student stories and they evaluate students’ texts according to their own set of criteria in the exam.