Adaptation of Peyami Safa's stories to level A2 for teaching Turkish as a foreign language

The current study deals with the adaptation of supplementary text materials, especially reading materials, according to their levels for teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The main purposes of our study are explaining the adaptation process of stories that are used as supplementary teaching materials to improve reading skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language and adaptation of the stories titled "Mişon's Treasure, Mysterious Mansion, Within the Diamonds, and Missing Man" in the Cingöz Recai story series by Peyami Safa according to the Level A2 achievements of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and textlinguistics criteria. The main aims of adaptation studies are considering the achievements of target level and textlinguistics criteria and trying to protect the semantic and grammatical structures of the text. Authentic texts are the richest materials of a language as they contain various contexts. However, since authentic texts are created for native speakers, they may be complicated and contain many unknowns for language learners. Accordingly, adapting authentic materials to the level of the target population might be a useful method to use semantic integrity and contexts of these texts. During the adaptation process, the authors tried to establish a text structure that presents an "understandable message", and at first, small-scale structure analyses were conducted on the stories. Following the lexical and grammatical analysis, the stories were analyzed in detail. The stories were examined and adapted on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Leveled reading sets and adapted texts for different levels are usually the main sources for second language teaching of many languages. As a result of the sociological and technological evolution, language learning out of school and class environment is becoming more widespread now. Therefore, we are entering a new world in which we can use listening materials, interactive materials, and reading texts/books that contain natural language inputs in addition to the common elements of formal education such as educators, textbooks, and curriculum. To keep up with this evolution and development, we are facing the fact that we will have to produce more. The fact that this production progresses slowly and only a limited number of materials are being produced should remind us that rich sources of Turkish literature can be used in teaching Turkish to foreigners. If printed and audial materials of Turkish literature will be adapted as leveled materials according to the relevant criteria of teaching Turkish to foreigners, an increase in the production speed and quantity of language materials can be easily achieved. In order to provide contributions to the above-mentioned facts, the current paper presents the analysis of the stories according to the textlinguistics approach. Moreover, the semantic and language structure in the stories were determined and the stories were adapted according to the Level A2 achievements.