Investigation of the story characters in middle school Turkish coursebooks

Middle school Turkish course books are instructed by various publications including both Ministry of National Education and private ones. Private publications differentiate according to the year of teaching with the approval of the Ministry of National Education. There are some features intended to get the students to acquire by texts in Turkish course books which have been determined and planned to be instructed in school years. These characteristics take place in Turkish course book and texts in order to affect the academic and personal development of the student in a positive way. This study has been carried out to determine the features of the characters in story texts of Turkish course books and to identify the features intended to be given by the story characters. • Which themes are included mostly in the stories? • What are the types of the texts in Turkish course books, how is the distribution in terms of books? • Is any story and/or author attained when all of the publications are reviewed? • Do the features of characters show similarity among publications when the most mentioned features of the characters are reviewed? These questions establish a basis for the study. The sample of the study is composed of middle school (5, 6, 7, and 8) publications of both Ministry of National Education and private publishers which were instructed during 2015-2016 school year and recommended by the Ministry of National Education. Consequently, the features of the story characters in Turkish course books have been identified. Additionally, three story texts in total have been commonly found in the course books. After all of the texts in Turkish course books have been investigated, it has been identified that 29 authors have works in more than one publication. It has been ascertained that the common feature in three publications (7th Grade Meram, 8th Grade Ministry of National Education and 8th Grade Evren publications) is "determined" when the most repeated features in the publications are selected taking the features of the characters in consideration. It has been found that there are also some texts that can affect students negatively. It has been understood that the features of the story characters in middle school course books are not intensive. Key Words: Turkish course books, story, character, character features