EVALUATION OF THE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY FOREIGN STUDENTS STUDYING AT TURKISH LANGUAGE CENTER IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE ERROR ANALYSIS METHOD

Nowadays, the focus of foreign language teaching has changed from the nature of the language to the learner. Since the learner has become the center of the learning process, the teaching process and learnercentered instruction have become essential for effective language learning. As a language, Turkish is becoming more essential in education as well as in daily life due to the important role it plays in forming communication chains throughout the world. However, an adequate background of Turkish in the literature of foreign language teaching and learning does not exist. Therefore, the field of teaching Turkish as a foreign language is relatively new in terms of the innovative methodology of instruction. The objective of this study is to make use of error analysis method while evaluating the writing skills of Turkish learners who were asked to write essays about “what do you think about Turkey” and “education in Turkey”. The data of the study cover 22 A2-level students studying at the TÖMER of Gaziosmanpasa University (GOÜ-TÖMER). The students come from Afghanistan, Germany, Azerbaijan, Kenya, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Errors are classified as grammatical errors, word selection errors, syntactic errors, orthographical and punctuation errors. The evaluation of the errors is limited to interlingual-developmental errors. As a result, 1154 errors are detected. 5.7% of these errors are due to word selection, %7.1 is a syntactic error, 22.09% are grammatical errors, and 64.9% are due to orthographical and punctuation mistakes. Some suggestions about the improvement of the writing skill are presented within the light of this evaluation.