Evaluation of fifth-grade Turkish course learning and teaching process in terms of comprehension instruction

This research investigated teaching practices used by 5th grade classroom teachers in elementary Turkish classes. Specifically, this research focused on teacher practices and opinions towards improving comprehension skills of students in classroom settings. Since there are more comprehension instruction activities at the fifth grade level in Turkish class when compared to previous grade levels and content areas in elementary education, this research explored time and instruction devoted by fifth grade classroom teachers to improve their students? comprehension skills. This research also explored how allocate and to use teaching time effectively to improve students? comprehension skills.The participants of this research consisted of five classroom teachers teaching fifth grade students. The research was conducted in Ankara, in 2008-2009 education years. All teachers employed in this research have worked as classroom teachers during the research process. The participants were chosen by using criterion sampling which is one of the purposeful sampling techniques. In this research, observations, semi structured interviews, and documents (artifacts) were used to collect data. During the data collecting process, observation forms and video-camera was used to record observations done in the classroom settings. Semi-structured interview form was used to obtain participants? opinions regarding their instructional practices for teaching comprehension skills to their students. For the classifying activities and questions in fifth grade teacher manuel, classification check lists were used. The researcher used content and descriptive analyses techniques to analyze data obtained in this research.The research findings revealed that the changes done in Turkish Primary Teaching Program, in 2005 are not enough alone to achieve expectations, so these changes should be considered as a whole and this process should focuse on teacher training. Although the approaches in teacher training have changed and the different approaches to reading instruction have been developed, teacher will keep using traditional approaches in their classroom settings to teach reading. In this regard, some of the research results are in the following:1) Teachers devoted the least time for mental preparation, monitoring and evaluation in their Turkish classes. They devoted more time for reading practices, comprehension instruction, and giving assignments to the students than mental preparation. The teachers devoted the most time to activities which are not related to comprehension instruction such as used time for grammar, spent time among activities, and assignments which is not related to comprehension instruction.2) Teachers used questioning strategy the most in their instructional setting. Explanation, connecting with daily life, vocabulary and concept practices, making inferences, connections to background knowledge, and predictions follow respectively.3) Teachers benefited from various sources providing information about strategies including making predictions, and inferences, finding out main idea, clarifying/classifying, and questioning, but they have not done anything with regard to using strategy, teaching strategy explicitly, and guiding the students.4) Since teachers did not apply activities about improving comprehension skills and guidance of students within their classroom settings; monitoring practices toward the comprehension process were not sufficient.5) Teachers did not use intertextual meaning construction activities, they used activities including deriving meaning within and beyond the text.6) The teachers generally used teacher manual to execute their instructional processes in the classrooms.