Analyzing 6th, 7th and 8th grade students' free writing studies according to textual criteria

In this study, the use of text-linguistic cohesion and coherence elements in the free written expression of students studying at the 6th, 7th and 8th grade levels of secondary school; students' subject preference, text type preference and text achievement status were examined. Descriptive analysis from qualitative methods was used to analyze the research data. The study was conducted with 42 students studying at Şehit Süleyman Aydın Imam Hatip Secondary School in Hafik district of Sivas province. In the written texts created by the students; the use of repetitions, referential elements, modification elements, substitution elements, subtractive structures, contextual elements, tense and aspect elements, parallel structures, title, main idea sentence, stylistic elements and content schema were determined. In the process of analyzing the research data, an evaluation rubric consisting of the categories of using lexical cohesion correctly and effectively, using grammatical cohesion correctly and effectively, using cohesion elements correctly and effectively was prepared and the data obtained during the analysis process were analyzed according to this rubric. Then, the findings were tabulated according to the grade levels and the students' topic choices, text achievement, text type choices, and their use of cohesion and cohesion elements were examined. Besides, the results obtained by analyzing the student texts in terms of tense and aspect, punctuation and spelling rules, grammatical rules were evaluated. Accordingly, it was determined that the students' level of correct use of spelling rules and punctuation marks was insufficient, they could not produce texts in accordance with the formal features that a text should have, and they frequently included temporal inconsistencies within the text. When the text success status was analyzed, it was concluded that the level of successful text production of 8th grade students was higher than that of 7th and 6th grade students, and that the correct and effective use of cohesion and coherence elements positively affected text success.