Poem Selection and Text Processing in Secondary School Turkish Textbooks

Abstract

Starting at the school level, language education develops comprehension and expression skills. It is important to develop literacy skills as it is the basic way of acquiring information. Native language textbooks created with a text-based approach are an integral part of this process. Accurate, qualified, and purposefully selected texts help achieve the objectives of language education, especially comprehension. In Turkey, the Turkish language courses offered in secondary schools to develop comprehension and expression skills aim to develop both the students’ native language competencies and their higher-level cognitive skills such as critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation along with their language skills. Since its inception in 2019, the Turkish Curriculum limits the selection of texts for textbooks to a framework that represents informative, narrative, and poetic structures. Due to the scarcity of studies on poetry and its teaching process, this study aims to determine the general view of the teaching process of poems in secondary school Turkish textbooks. Additionally, the study examines all the textbooks to be used in secondary schools in Turkey in the 2022–2023 academic year. The research model is a basic qualitative research design, and data were collected through document analysis. The analysis concluded that course books attempted to make students understand the poems in middle school Turkish textbooks, especially with open-ended questions in the process of comprehension education, and were limited to investigating the meanings of unknown words, explaining the content, determining the subject and main emotion, and trying to recognize some figures of speech.