The practices and strategies of a Turkish teacher who makes a difference towards the development of reading comprehension skills: A case study

In this study, it was aimed to determine the practices of a Turkish language teacher who made a difference in her lessons to improve reading comprehension skills and the reading comprehension strategies she used in these practices. The research was conducted with a successful Turkish language teacher who received awards in her own branch and came to the forefront with her identity as a writer as well as her teaching profession, and a case study was preferred as the research method in order to examine the practices of this teacher in depth. Observation form, teacher interview form and documents obtained from students were used as data collection tools. The data collection process lasted 14 weeks and content analysis was used to analyze the data obtained. The findings regarding the participant teacher's practices for the development of reading comprehension skills were divided into three main themes: lessons conducted in the context of the requirements of the curriculum, lessons conducted with the awareness that reading is a skill, and lessons conducted with the acceptance of the existence of the exam system; and four sub-themes: text lessons, summary lessons, magazine lessons and paragraph lessons. As a result of the research, it was determined that the teacher used pre- reading strategies the most, followed by post-reading strategies and the least by reading order strategies. While all of the pre-reading strategies were used in the lessons, it was observed that only reading fluently and using context clues were used among the reading order strategies. Among the post-reading strategies, it was found that the most frequently used strategies were using the question-answer relationship, question generation and discussion strategies. It was seen that the participant teacher gave a lot of space and importance especially to the strategy of creating/generating questions.