The effects of authentic task-based authentic material usage on students' reading comprehension, writing skills and writing motivation

The objective of Turkish course, which is significant in primary school, is to enable the students to achieve active language skills that are the prerequisites for an effective communication between individuals and societies. The Turkish course aims and helps to improve language skills of the students in order to train them as quality, and at the same time informed literate individuals. An approach that could promote this goal is the authentic learning approach based on authentic tasks and material. The study was conducted with nested mixed design, which is one of the mixed method designs where qualitative and quantitative method are used together. Quantitative data was collected with a quasi-experimental process in the study and the empirical process was conducted with the pretest-posttest design with control group. Qualitative data was collected at the end of the study using a semi-structured interview form. The study was conducted at a primary school located at Eskisehir province city center during 2014 – 2015 academic year spring semester. Twenty-two students that attended Class 4-E and included in the study group and 21 students that attended Class 4-G and included in the control group participated in the study. Study data were collected using different data collection tools including "Personal Data Form", "Reading Comprehension Test", "Writing Motivation Scale", "Writing Skills Scale", and a semi-structured interview form designed to identify the views of students and teachers on authentic task-based authentic material. Furthermore, in the application conducted 6 hours per week during 10 weeks, outline syllabi and instruction material for the Innovations and Developments, Our World and the Space themes of the Turkish course designed by the author were utilized. All activities conducted during the 10 weeks, 6 hours per week were organized based on the material that students encounter in real life settings every day and real life reading and writing goals, thus, the classes were conducted with authentic task-based authentic material. All manuscripts read and written during the course served a real purpose. All texts read in and guided the course were selected from authentic material such as journals and newspapers and all material listened or watched were selected from authentic material such as TV or radio shows. During the course of the empirical process, group studies were conducted as well. In these studies, after the activities were conducted with groups of students, they were asked to make a presentation in the classroom. At the end of the unit instructions, a general assessment was conducted, and the products created by the students were collected. Quantitative data were analyzed with unrelated samples t-test and for qualitative data descriptive analysis method was utilized. A general assessment of study findings demonstrated that authentic task-based authentic material use in Turkish language course improved reading comprehension and writing skills and writing motivation of primary school 4th grade students. Furthermore, it was identified that participating students had positive views on the Turkish language course instructed using authentic task-based authentic material use. It was observed that the students found the authentic material as similar to the material they encounter in their daily lives, and stated that they liked the fact that the book creation, letter reading-writing and other activities would be seen by others. In addition to these results, it was found that the students did not like long reading texts, had trouble in book creation and reading and writing longer texts and got bored during the reading and writing of longer texts. Another finding obtained in the study is that students comprehended better what they read or wrote, their reading was more permanent, they read and wrote faster, loved reading and writing better and were more motivated to engage in these activities, were more careful with the punctuation marks and were more meticulous in reading and writing activities thanks to the authentic material. Keywords: Primary school, Authentic task, Authentic material, Reading comprehension, Writing skills, Writing motivation.