Adaptation of Reşat Nuri Güntekin's "Love Letters" and "Bir Sip of Water" stories to B1 level in teaching Turkish to foreigners

Turkish language teaching is carried out through textbooks, in which foreigners who want to learn Turkish can improve their reading skills, master the language and read Turkish cultures. The limited time they offer in the educational environment makes free reading activities necessary. In free reading activities, you will ensure the efficient use of texts that are appropriate to the learners' levels, offer cultural promotion, and have aesthetic value. This study was carried out for the purpose of productive recording for the free reading activities of readers who have reached a certain stage in language pronunciation but have not yet mastered the language sufficiently. This work will provide a text that will be beneficial to language learners and will satisfy their productive reading. In order to contribute to the texts that students will read in their free time activities in teaching Turkish to foreigners, the stories "Love Letters" and "A Sip of Water" written by Reşat Nuri Güntekin, an important novel and story writer of Turkish literature, were adapted. In our study, in which the documentary scanning method was used as a descriptive research, the stories were adapted in accordance with the structural approach. The adaptation process was carried out by accepting the B1 level language structures in the Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language Program created by the Turkish Maarif Foundation as criteria in order to enable students to acquire the reading skill gains in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. During the adaptation process, the words mentioned in the story were checked, taking into account the words up to B1 level in the textbooks for teaching Turkish to foreigners, and the words they had not yet learned were identified. The frequency of use of the words in the stories in Written Turkish was also checked. While checking the meanings of the words, the Current Turkish Dictionary of the Turkish Language Association was used as a source and a dictionary about the stories was created. Text adaptation processes were carried out with the text adaptation techniques introduced by Bölükbaş in his study Simplifying Reading Texts According to Language Levels in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language in 2015. After the stories were stimulated in line with the criteria, expert opinion was sought and the adaptation process was completed by making the necessary adjustments. It has been determined that the most frequently used technique in application processes is lexical substitution. While the adaptation process was carried out, care was taken not to lose the intended message, aesthetics and fluent language of the work. Reading comprehension activities have been created so that the meaning of the texts can be better understood by the learners. Keywords: Turkish as a foreign language, text adaptation, Reading skill, simplification.