The outlook of rhetorical relations of informative texts in Turkish school books

The aim of this study is to describe the diversity and frequency of rhetorical relationships that ensure consistency in informative texts in secondary school (5,6,7 and 8th grades) Turkish textbooks. Semantic relations in the texts were examined within the framework of Rhetoric Structure Theory and the views of rhetorical relations were defined according to class levels and text types. Only informative texts only in written form were selected in the textbooks and the selection of informative texts is based on the classification determined by the Ministry of National Education (MEB). In this study, paragraphs are considered as the basic unit and rhetorical relationship views that provide consistency in the whole and below paragraphs are presented in a table. The findings were interpreted in the conclusion section. It was observed that the relationships used in the texts mostly made explicit the text types and the rhetorical relationships differed in terms of frequency and diversity distribution according to class levels. Keywords: consistency, informative text, rhetorical relationship