Comparison of readability levels of informative texts in 5th grade Turkish course books according to Turkish course curriculums

The purpose of this study was to determine the readability levels of informational texts in the 5th-grade middle school Turkish textbook, prepared in accordance with the 2006-2009, 2015, 2019, and 2024 Turkish Curriculums. Data for the study was collected through document analysis, a qualitative research method, and five Turkish textbooks approved by the Ministry of National Education (MEB) were included in the study. One of the most important points emphasized in the Turkish Curriculum is that lessons are text- and reading-based. The aim was to investigate whether the 5th-grade Turkish textbooks, written in accordance with the Turkish Curriculums prepared in different years within the education system, included texts appropriate to the reading level of the target audience. To this end, the readability scores of the texts in the textbook were calculated. The "readability score" is calculated by determining the number of syllables, words, and sentences, and determining the word and sentence lengths of the texts, and the level of the text is determined. A total of 55 informational texts were examined within the scope of the study. Narrative texts were deliberately excluded from the study, while poetry and drama texts were excluded from the study because their sentence structures were not suitable for calculating readability scores. The average syllable length per word of the analyzed texts was found to range from 2.40 to 2.96, and the average word length per sentence varied from 6.06 to 22.33. The five levels included in Ateşman's (1997) readability formula and the three levels included in Çetinkaya-Uzun's (2010) Readability Formula do not exhibit a homogeneous distribution. According to Ateşman's (1997) formula, the analyzed informative texts were determined to be concentrated at the "medium difficulty" level, while according to Çetinkaya-Uzun's (2010) formula, the analyzed informative texts were determined to be concentrated at the "educational" level.