Improvement of Turkish reading comprehension and writing skills of foreign primary school students with educational digital game-assisted instructional activities

The present study aims to determine how the reading comprehension and writing skills of foreign primary school students in A1 level Turkish language classes could be improved with educational digital game-assisted instructional activities. The participants of the study, which was designed according to the action research methodology, were determined by using criterion sampling, one of the purposive sampling methods. Thus, the study was conducted with 10 foreign primary school students who experienced problems with A1 level Turkish language reading comprehension and writing skills. Six action cycles were conducted to improve the Turkish reading comprehension and writing skills of the students with educational digital game-assisted instructional activities. A personal information form, a reading comprehension achievement test, a writing skill assessment rubric, a research diary, student products, observation, checklists, interview forms, and validity committee audio and video recordings were used as data collection tools in the study. The quantitative data of the study were analyzed with the dependent samples t-test, and the Kendall W-Test which is used to determine inter-coder agreement. The effect size was calculated for the results obtained from the dependent samples t-test. The qualitative data were analyzed with thematic analysis method using NVivo 12 software. As a result of the action cycles conducted with educational digital game-assisted instructional activities in the research, it was concluded that 10 students who experienced problems with A1 level reading comprehension and writing skills exhibited improvements in Turkish reading comprehension and writing skills as a second language.