Examination of the texts in 6th grade Turkish textbooks in the context of cohesion and coherence, one of the textuality criteria

The courses in which basic language skills are gained and developed in our country are Turkish courses. The main tools used to gain these skills are textbooks. This situation makes text selection important for Turkish textbooks. The texts are not just groups of sentences, but rather groups of sentences that come together within the framework of certain criteria. These criteria, which make sentence sequences into texts, are called textuality criteria, and Beaugrande and Dressler classified these criteria as cohesion, coherence, purposefulness, acceptability, informativeness, contingency, intertextuality. The aim of this study is to evaluate the texts in the Turkish textbooks taught to the 6th graders in the 2020-2021 academic year in terms of cohesion and coherence, which are among the textuality criteria. For this purpose, 18 texts in three different Turkish textbooks taught to 6th grade students in different regions of Turkey were examined according to cohesion and coherence, which are among the textuality criteria. Descriptive analysis method, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the analysis of the texts. The narrative, informative and poetic texts in the books were examined and evaluated according to the "Structure of the Text" template developed by İlker Aydın and Gülşen Torusdağ. According to the results obtained, while lexical cohesion elements are used in all texts, grammatical cohesion elements are ignored in many texts. While the most used cohesion element in the texts is correlation elements, the least used cohesion element is the substitution element. In terms of coherence, it has been determined that there is no deficiency in the texts except the "Silver Wing" text. As a result, it was determined that very few texts contained all the elements of cohesion and coherence in all three books examined, and most of the texts were not created in accordance with these criteria.