Relationship between metalinguistic awareness skills and writing skills of middle school students

The purpose of this study is to determine the potential relationship between metalinguistic awareness skills and writing skills of middle school students. The population of the research is formed by 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students which attend the 2014-2015 school year in Uşak city center. The sample of the research have been selected by medium and high leveled (according to their success in Turkish lesson) 60 middle school students, 33 female and 27 male students that attend in Uşak province Middle School which can be expressed as a "medium level" school according to the TEOG test. This number is specified to be 15 people from each grade level (5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades). Phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic tests have been applied to measure the metalinguistic awareness level of the students, metalinguistic awareness test was obtained from the sum of these tests. The obtained results were evaluated by three domain experts and researchers; prediction of the tests of students writing skills was examined. To measure the students ' writing skills "complete story " method has been employed; the compositions were evaluated according to the analytical scoring scale which was prepared by Çetin(2002) by three experts and researchers. According to the obtained data and analyses it is possible to say that there is a significant relationship between middle school students' metalinguistic awareness skills and their writing skills. To the matter in hand as the dimensions of metalinguistic awareness skills; we can also discuss the same case when phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic awareness skills taken separately. This awareness skills, writing skills of middle school students showed that a significant proportion of procedure. It has been observed that, students with high awareness skills also have high writing skills; students which have low writing skills are also low in these skills. It emerged the fact that contributing to the development of metalinguistic skills of the students, will also develope their writing skills. Keywords: metalinguistic, phonological awareness, morphological awareness,semantic awareness, syntactic awareness, writing skill.