A comparison of writing skill in the context of target language at the elementary and intermediate levels of Turkish as a foreign language

A COMPARISON OF WRITING SKILL IN THE CONTEXT OF TARGET LANGUAGE AT THE ELEMENTARY AND INTERMEDIATE LEVELS OF TURKISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE ABSTRACT A foreign language education is molded by four basic language skills, which are reading, writing, speaking and listening. Also, these for skills are divided into two groups as being understanding and lecturing. Reading and listening, which are learning skills, are about understanding and interpreting somebody's speaking or a written material. Actions oriented understanding other people's feelings and thoughts by reading and/or listening forms the base of understanding skills. On the other hand, writing and speaking, which are lecturing skills, are about explaining one's feelings and thoughts verbally and/or by writing. Since speaking and writing are the skills for producing, they necessitate students to be more active comparing to listening and reading. Surely, these skills cannot be thought apart from each other in language education. Speaking and writing skills are expected to be used in order to measure and evaluate students' feelings and thoughts, knowledge they get and how the understand it. The frequencies of activities devoted to improve students' writing skills and giving the feedbacks of them to students by determining the mistakes are thought to result in increasing of students' awareness and decreasing of their mistakes in progress of time. For this aim, one of the methods for determining and classifying the mistakes of students in written expression is error analysis. This study is created in order to follow the error frequencies and improvements of the 10 students who learnt Turkish from A2 till B2 at Ibn Haldun University TÖMER by comparing their own written materials. Their texts are examined by using error analysis and later their improvements are followed by comparing their mistakes between their own levels.