Metaphors in secondary school Turkish course books

Language is the most important means of communication which protects the history, traditions, emotions, and thoughts of a nation and transfers them to the next generations. The Turkish language has rich properties and methods with respect to comprehension and production. One of the most important methods used for comprehension and production is the use of "metaphors". Metaphors are forms which enable humans to make sense of their environments and events around them and infer meaning with the help of their seemingly meaningless experiences. Metaphors, which have a big effect on the sense-making process, are not only influential in language but also in our thoughts and actions. In the concretization of abstract ideas, simplification of the complicated, and reaching the known from the unknown, metaphors are one of the most important facilitators. Turkish lessons incorporate the teaching of comprehension and production skills. Because the first encounters with and use of abstract concepts for the development of such skills begin to emerge particularly in the secondary school level, certain difficulties may be experienced. To resolve these diffulties, teachers try to teach all the rules of the language and comprehension-production techniques in Turkish lessons. This teaching can be done most effectively with the use of Turkish coursebooks. Therefore, the texts in Turkish coursebooks affect learners' language, thoughts, and actions. This study investigates the role of the metaphorical uses in Turkish coursebooks in the development of comprehension and production skills and the frequency of such metaphorical uses within certain categories. In our study, we first discuss the figures of speech which can be analyzed under the category of metaphors and information about metaphors. Later, metaphorical expressions found in the texts in Turkish course books were presented in tables. In the first table, metaphors, which emerge in relation to figures of speech, were analyzed. Metaphorical expressions were the most common in 6th graders' course books. 6th grade curriculum incorporates the concept of "word meaning". Therefore, this result was epxected and consistent. When the grade levels were taken into consideration in general, "istiare/eğretileme" was found to be the most frequent metaphorical expression. In Turkish, "istiare" is used as the lexical counterpart of "metaphor". The results supported this finding. In the texts, apart from "istiare", metaphorical expressions related to differnet figures of speech such as "teşbih, mecaz, mecaz-ı mürsel, deyim, teşhis" were found. In the other table, metaphorical expressions were given as they appear in categories. These categories were comprised of 8 components, namely "human, animal, nature, emotion, object/thing, place, shape, and others". Examples of metaphorical expressions were mostly about the "nature" category. The fact that the themes of "health and nature" and "nature and universe" appeared in the 5th and the 6th, 7th and 8th graders respectively had an effect on this result. Metaphorical expressions were also analyzed in terms of concreteness and abstractness and abstract metaphorical expressions were most common in 8th grader texts. This finding was appropriate when the cognitive development of this group of childern is taken into consideration. Metaphorical expressions should find more place in Turkish course books. Metaphorical expressions are necessary and beneficial for students' cognitive and language development.