An investigation on writing skills and writing anxieties of Somalian students learning Turkish as a foreign language

The aim of the study is to evaluate the success levels of middle-level Somalian students who learn Turkish as a foreign language, determine their level of anxiety about writing skills, and reveal the grammatical mistakes they make in their written expressions. In this direction, 53 Somali students at medium level studying at Bursa Uludağ University Turkish Teaching Center in 2018-2019 constituted the study group of the study. In collecting the quantitative data of the research, Personal Information Form, Writing Anxiety Scale in Turkish as a Foreign Language developed by Şen and Boylu (2017) and Written Expression Grade Scoring Key developed by Büyükikiz (2011) were used. Qualitative data were also collected through document analysis, and the Data Collection and Analysis Form was used in this process. Qualitative data were analyzed using descriptive analysis method and quantitative data using descriptive statistical techniques as well as T Test, Anova, and Kruskall Wallis test statistics. According to the qualitative results of the study, a total of 1983 grammatical errors were found in the written expression samples of Somalian students. It was found that 37.6% of them had morphology, 36% spelling and punctuation, 14.2% word-meaning, 8.5% phonology and 3.7% syntax errors. In addition, these categories are detailed and exemplified under various subheadings. According to the quantitative results of the research, it has been revealed that 20 (37.7%) of 53 Somalian students have a low level, 32 (60.4%) have medium and 1 (1.9%) have a high level of writing success. However, the writing success; gender, age, education level, residence time in Turkey, has been found to differ significantly according to the Turkish frequency of reading and writing variable frequency. It was also determined in the study that Somali students have a moderate level of writing anxiety. Writing anxiety creates a significant difference according to gender and education level; age, no time for Turkey, according to Turkish frequency of reading and writing of variable frequency was observed that create a significant difference. However, there was no significant relationship between the writing achievement and anxiety scores of the students participating in the study. The research is thought to contribute to the field of teaching Turkish to Somalians.