THE LEVEL OF UNDERSTANDING CONCEPTS AND MISCONCEPTION RELATED TO WRITING OF TURKISH LANGUAGE PRESERVICE TEACHERS

Teaching and learning basic concepts of courses accurately and completely is a prerequisite for curriculums to achieve their objectives and acquisitions. In this regard, teachers and preservice teachers must have a grasp of concepts related to their field. The deficiencies and errors in concepts included in special field competencies would affect learning and teaching outputs negatively. In this context, the purpose of this study is to determine Turkish Language preservice teachers’ levels of understanding concepts and misconceptions related to writing, which is one of the basic language skills. The study group of the research which was designed in survey method consisted of 136 undergraduates studying at Necmettin Erbakan University Ahmet Keleşoğlu Faculty of Education Turkish Language Teaching Department and taking Narration Techniques II: Writing Education course in 2014-2015 academic year. As the data collection tool, a 34-item form called “Concepts Related to Writing Skills” including the parts of “Basic Concepts on Writing”, “Concepts Related to Writing Methods and Techniques” and “Concepts Related to Text Types and Phraseology” was used. In the research, it was detected that preservice teachers’ levels of understanding concepts related to writing skill were insufficient, especially they had misconception about concepts which are included in name only in the chapters of the Curriculum related to writing but which are not explained or described or are never included. It has been determined that the preservice teachers had errors at a high level about the concepts of “main idea-main emotion, cursive script, theme, path, kinetic plan, style and redaction” in the first part of the survey; the concepts of “dissertation, categorization (clustering) technique and expository writing” in the second part; and the concepts of “explanatory description, persuasive text or operative text” in the third part.