Investigation of writing skills of secondary school 6th grade students in terms of various variables

Abstract

Communication is a skill that people have used since ancient times. Although communication differs in terms of its features in the process, it can be basically defined as the ability to understand and explain. The concept of "writing" has a special place in the skill of telling. Because the development of civilizations has generally been thanks to written culture. Knowledge and culture have been transferred to future generations through writings and have preserved their importance until today. The aim of this study is to examine the 6th grade students' ability to express their feelings, thoughts, dreams and impressions in writing, considering the importance of writing skills, in terms of various variables. In this direction, the case study design, one of the qualitative research methods, was preferred in the study. The research group of the study consists of 75 students at the 6th grade level in a state secondary school located in the southeast of Turkey and 5 Turkish teachers working in the same institution. In the data collection process of the study, firstly, a text with a free theme was written to the students. The data obtained from these texts were analyzed with the writing skill level determination rubric prepared by Bahşi (2018). In addition, student writings were evaluated in accordance with the scoring directive by using the attitude scale developed by Can and Ünal (2017) to determine the students' attitudes towards writing. Then, semi-structured interviews were conducted with Turkish teachers. In these interviews, teachers' opinions were taken on the variables that affect the students' writing skill levels. When the findings obtained from the study were interpreted, it was seen that the students' writing skill levels were not sufficient, but their attitudes towards writing were positive. In addition, this situation was affected by teacher, student, program and environment variables as a whole. However, it is seen that the environment variable negatively affects the level of writing skill in a dominant way.