Investigation of secondary school Turkish course books in the context of visual reading skill

The ability to read visually is experiencing a golden age with technological developments and the widespread use of the internet as a form of communication.With the use of internet-enabled cell phones and the rise of digital and social sharing spaces, images that are constantly shared and read have become an important part of life as a new means of expression, communication and transmission. Nowadays,visual literacy is used in daily life ,business and at all levels of education to facilitate information absorption and to present information. Many questions in the exams in our country today are asked with visual aids and in secondary education, analysing paragraphs is usually the most important task. Nowadays, most Turkish questions are answered with various visual aids such as diagrams, tables, figures and pictures. It is colored and decorated with numerical data with an interdisciplinary understanding. Turkish questions, which are generally focused on paragraph analysis at the secondary school level, are today colored with various visuals such as graphs, tables, figures and pictures, and are adorned with numerical data with an interdisciplinary understanding. In this study, the basic characteristic of visual reading, which is an area of linguistic ability in this study, the basic characteristics of visual reading, which is a language skill area in Turkish education, its relation to various fields, its status in Turkish teaching programs, its place in high school entrance exam and various studies in the literature related to visual reading skills are examined. How adequate Turkish secondary school textbooks in terms of the acquisition of visual reading skills. An attempt was made to find an answer to the problem. With in the scope of this problem, 8 Turkish textbooks taught in secondary schools and İmam Hatip schools in the 2022-2024 school years were selected as a purposive sample using the document review research method. The image types and their relationships with basic language skills and grammar topics were analyzed based on expert options. In the study, Miles and Huberman's (1994) expert opinion statistics were applied to the data organised through Expert Opinion Meetings. As a result of the data obtained, it was found that the proportion of visual reading activities/exercises in secondary school textbooks is insufficient among all activities/exercises and that most activities/exercises are arranged according to the lower levels of Bloom's renewed taxonomy. In the research, it was found that the visual types preferred in the activities/exercises in Turkish secondary school textbooks were rich, but the frequency of using visual types was not evenly distributed among the activities/exercises. It was found that visuals were almost never used in grammar lessons in the Turkish textbooks studied. In parallel with these findings,the study created alternative activities/exercises to the activities/exercises in the textbooks and made suggestions for developing the increasingly valuable visual reading skill.