A study on the comparative analysis of writing skills activities in Japanese and Turkish textbooks

Özge Karakaş Yıldırım and Mehmet Özdemir

African Educational Research Journal
Published: November 8 2022
Volume 10, Issue 4
Pages 410-418
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30918/AERJ.104.22.060

Abstract

Writing is the result of our desire to express our feelings, thoughts, dreams, and ourselves. In today's education, with the penetration of technology into our lives, what we express not only on paper but also on the screen is within the scope of writing skills. Writing is a language skill that requires high-level mental skills such as producing a new product, questioning, evaluating, and analyzing-synthesizing. A country's reading literacy success in PISA provides information about that country's native language education policy. Therefore, depending on the reading literacy learning outcome of Turkey and Japan in PISA and since writing is the last language skill to be acquired, it was aimed to comparatively examine the activities on writing skills in Turkish textbooks (fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades) and the writing activities in the (seventh, eighth, and ninth grades) Japanese textbooks to reveal similarities and differences in these textbooks. Case study method one of the qualitative research methods was used in this study, and it was carried out with the limitation of writing skills in Turkish textbooks published in 2018 and Japanese textbooks published in 2015 and 2016. It was seen that writing activities in Turkish textbooks have a ratio of 20% (f = 267), and writing activities in Japanese textbooks have an 11% (f = 36) ratio. Although there are too many repetitive activities in Turkish textbooks, it has been observed that some of the learning outcomes were not exemplified by any activity. On the contrary, content for writing skills, which was addressed with more general expressions, was reflected in every activity in Japanese textbooks.

Keywords: Language education, curriculum, PISA, textbooks, learning outcomes.

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