Opinions of primary school teachers on the initial literacy process continuing with distance education due to the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in China in 2019 and was highly contagious, created a panic and uneasiness in the world. In order to support the experts' call to "stay at home", countries temporarily suspended their education processes and students were provided with distance education (Üstün ve Özçiftçi, 2020). This situation has occurred in Turkey in a similar way and due to the Covid -19 pandemic, education activities in schools have started to be carried out with distance education as of March 23, 2020. This situation has become more The COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in China in 2019 and was highly contagious, created a panic and uneasiness in the world. In order to support the experts' call to "stay at home", countries temporarily suspended their education processes and students were provided with distance education (Üstün ve Özçiftçi, 2020). This situation has occurred in Turkey in a similar way and due to the Covid -19 pandemic, education activities in schools have started to be carried out with distance education as of March 23, 2020. This situation has become more critical especially for students who are in the first grade and who are in the process of learning to read and write. As a matter of fact, literacy is a very important skill in the success of the individual in both social and school life. Acquiring this skill properly begins in the first grade of primary school, and the use and development of the skill continues throughout life. Babayiğit and Erkuş (2017) state that a mistake to be made at this stage may negatively affect both the literacy skills of the student and their attitude towards literacy. While great sensitivity should be shown even for the first face-to-face literacy teaching process, the fact that certain periods of the initial literacy teaching have to be continued remotely due to the pandemic brings along various concerns about the efficiency of the teaching process. Therefore, it is extremely important to carry out various researches on how the process progresses, its efficiency, outputs, and evaluation from the perspective of parents, teachers and students, both in terms of the field and the quality of the practices, identifying the problems experienced and developing suggestions for solving these problems and putting them into practice. Based on this importance, in this study, it is aimed to determine the opinions of priamary school teachers about the initial literacy process that continues with distance education due to the Covid-19 pandemic.