A research on secondary school students? texts? expression mistakes

This study has been carried out in order to find out the written expression mistakes of the secondary school students and to identify the effects of socio economic and socio cultural level of the students on the amount of those kind of mistakes. In this descriptive study, the universe is the second grade primary school students attending the schools of Alanya which is one of the districts of Antalya during 2009-2010 educational year.The sample consists of 180 students randomly chosen from the different schools such as Barbaros Azakoğlu Primary School,Aşağıoba Hasan Atıcı Primary School, Demirtaş Boarding Primary School which are estimated as the representative of different levels of socio economic and socio cultural layers in Alanya.In the research,primarily, students are asked to write texts in narrative, descriptive and argumentative styles of narration.To provide students with ease,they are given a form each including four different topics any of which may be chosen by the students.This application has been repeated three times and 540 different texts have been analized in details.After searching through different sources and then collecting the data, a list of 21 main items containing the basic written expression mistakes about the meaning and the structure has been prepared. Upon examining the texts of the students ,the imperfect sentences have been found out and compared with the items in the formerly mentioned list.As a result of this comparison, the data is organized and the frequency of encountering written expression mistakes have been stated in percentage. The charts that show the frequency rates in terms of written expression mistake types,schools,classes,different socio-economic and socio-cultural levels have been prepared.Those charts have been analized and interpreted in the light of 12 basic questions and some results have been reached such as: (1) Each student has made at least one written expression mistake. (2) The most common problems in written expression are the mistakes related to the main components of a sentence with the ratio of %97.2 and the words wrongly used for another with the ratio of %50.5. (3) There isn?t a direct relationship between the socio cultural and socio economic levels of the students and the frequency of written expression mistakes.The things needed to be done to minimize the expression mistakes are presented as recommendations at the end of the study.