Analysis of teaching Turkish as a foreign language coursebooks in terms of textuality features

Today, changing living conditions, developing technology and the presence of differentiating needs increased the communication of societies with each other, revealing the effort to use a common language, which is necessary for accurate communication. For this reason, the need to learn a language, and a foreign language, which is the sub-component of it, manifested itself. Foreigners need to learn Turkish for various reasons and this makes teaching Turkish as a foreign language important. With the teaching of Turkish as a foreign language, the purpose is to give people reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills. The reading texts in textbooks play important roles in acquiring these four basic skills. Text is an extended judgment form formed by the juxtaposition of sentences and presents the expressions in detail with a strong communicative aspect. It is expected that the texts in the textbooks prepared for teaching Turkish as a foreign language are carefully created and will help in acquiring language skills. The field of linguistics, which examines the created texts according to the criteria of textuality and uncovers the classification rules of the texts, is referred to as text linguistics. Text linguistics examines the features that must be present in texts and evaluates them according to the criteria of textuality. These criteria, which were expressed concretely by Beaugrande and Dressler (1981: 113) for the first time, are divided into two as text-centered and reader-centered. Cohesion and coherence constitute the text-centered criteria. Cohesion can be expressed as the presence of grammatical relations between sentences, as well as the semantic relations between the elements that constitute the text. Reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion are the tools providing tense and functional sentence structure cohesion. The transmission of the thoughts and events intended to be conveyed in the text to the reader within certain logic is referred to as coherence, which is important at the point of ensuring the subject integrity of the created text. A text must meet these criteria to be different from non-text mere words. The purpose of the present study is to examine the reading texts in the textbooks used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language in terms of text-centered criteria, cohesion, and coherence. For this purpose, a total of 127 reading texts in the Yeni Hitit 1-2-3 textbooks were examined in terms of cohesion and coherence, interpreted by presenting examples based on the findings obtained, and comparisons were made with percentage statistics. It was found that the reading texts that were created for teaching Turkish as a foreign language, which is discussed within the scope of the study, were prepared by considering the cohesion and coherence criteria. Grammatical and lexical relations were established between the cohesion and coherence tools that were used in the reading passages and the words, sentences, and paragraphs that constituted the text, and the harmony of the language elements used and the expressions in the texts was observed. The cohesion and coherence tools that were used in the texts contributed to increasing the effect of the texts, eliminating the monotony, and gaining fluency.