Investigating of Turkish reading texts in Türkçe Öğreniyorum and Hayat Boyu Türkçe book sets used within project on Promoting Integration of Syrian Kids into the Turkish Education (PIKTES) in terms of values education and culture transfer

Today, as the activities of language learning and teaching are increasing, learning only the linguistic structures is not enough for an individual to acquire a target language. The reason for this is the fact that language contains a society's cultural elements and values within itself. In this sense, language is not a structure consisting of only words and their lexical meanings, and in order to obtain competence in a target language, there is a necessity of learning it with its culture and values. In this research, the reading texts in Türkçe Öğreniyorum, book set prepared by Yunus Emre Institute, and in Hayat Boyu Türkçe, book set prepared by Directorate General of Lifelong Learning in Ministry of Education, are analyzed, compared with each other, and the results are evaluated. Both book sets are level A1 and A2. This study is based on "cultural elements and sub-elements reflecting on texts", framework prepared by Okur and Keskin (2013), in order to identify elements of culture transfer, and is based on 27 values determined by the Ministry of Education in order to identify value elements. The purpose of this research is to identify elements of culture transfer and value elements in the aforementioned book sets and to contribute to the literature by making some evaluations and recommendations. Being a qualitative research, this study is formed around the cultural analysis model, and the data are collected by using methods of document analysis and content analysis, which are qualitative data collection techniques. In this research, in the context of elements of culture transfer, it is identified that there are more elements of culture transfer in Hayat Boyu Türkçe than in Türkçe Öğreniyorum. Despite the quantitative abundance of elements of culture transfer, neither of the book sets is balanced in terms of distribution of elements of culture transfer. When they are evaluated in terms value elements, both book sets have a similar amount of value elements; however, the distribution of value elements is not balanced, either. Both book sets neglect many values. Through this research, it is attempted to be beneficial by providing data on this topic for the teaching materials to be prepared in the future. Keywords: Teaching Turkish for foreigners, PIKTES, value, culture, values education, culture transfer