Comparison of the Turkish Language Teaching Program with the mother language teaching programs of the continental of PISA 2018

In our country, various national exams are conducted to measure educational success and address deficiencies in our education system. In addition, our country takes part in various projects to measure the level of our education system on a global scale. One of these projects is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In PISA assessments, students' reading skills, as well as their literacy in mathematics and science, are evaluated. This research which is based on the reading skills data of the PISA application made in 2018, was done on the curriculum of Turkish Mother Tongue teaching programs and the curricula of the mother tongue teaching programs of the countries that came first in the field of reading skills in each continent. The mother tongue teaching programs of the countries that ranked first in the reading skills in the continents of Asia, Europe, Australia, South America, North America, and Oceania, which respectively are the countries of South Korea, Estonia, Australia, Chile, Canada, and New Zealand, have been compared with the Turkish Mother Tongue Teaching Program. The mother tongue teaching programs, which are influenced by various traditions and prepared with different approaches, have been examined in terms of their objectives, educational situations, content, assessment and evaluation methods, and grade levels. This analysis aims to identify both the similarities and differences among them. The data on the mother tongue teaching programs of the countries included in the study were obtained through document analysis by translating the information from English to Turkish, using the official websites of the respective ministries of education. Since the grade levels in mother tongue teaching programs vary, no specific restrictions have been made regarding the grade levels in the mother tongue teaching program analysis. In regards to the mother tongue teaching programs, results show similarities in the learning outcome centers in the brain. However, there are differences in terms of competencies, values, materials used, methods, and techniques, as well as assessment and evaluation criteria that support the learning outcomes in the mother tongue teaching programs. This situation has been discussed in the conclusion section, and various suggestions have been made for the update of the Turkish Mother Tongue Teaching Program.