Teaching Literacy With Vertical Basic Letters in a Multilingual Classroom: A Case Study


Reading is a skill for the childto be acquired and developed in primary school. However, it is known that there are many students in our country who have difficulty in gain ingth is skill. These difficulties may arise from different reason such as bilingualism and learning difficulties. Especially in some parts of our country there are children whose immigrant and mother tongue is different. These children have difficulty in reading and learning difficulties because their mother tongue is different. Before they start school, they speak the language they have learned from their families and environment. When they start their education life, they meet Turkish, the language of instruction. These children become bilingual children in the process. Since they do not know Turkish sufficiently, their vocabulary is not developed sufficiently. The processes of learning to read and write are negatively affected and make them feel academically inadequate. This research aims to describe how literacy teaching is carried out in a multilingual classroom. The study was carried out with the students of 1-J branch of Cumhuriyet Primary School in Güngören district of İstanbul in 2017-2018 academic year. The study was designed as a case study, one of the qualitative research approaches, and the data was collected through a Personal Information Form, unstructured observations and reflective diary. It was found that students had difficulty in writing the letters e, a and y mostly during the literacy teaching process. It was concluded that the literacy books prepared by the state are not sufficient in terms of quality and quantity. Especially the students whose mother tongue is different and found to be immigrants had difficulty in adapting to the school culture. It was determined that the problems of comprehending the open syllable were over come by the rhythm repetitions. In particular, it was concluded that reading open syllables with rhythm facilitates comprehension. It was found that the students who did not receive pre-school education generally could not place the letter size on the line specified on the page surface and had difficulty in writing the letters at the specified height and width. It was found that the most difficult letters for students to comprehend were “y, p, ğ”. During the writing process, the students had difficulty in writing the letters “e, a, y”. These students had problems in positioning the queues of the letters and they didn’t complete the writing. It was also found that they could not position the letters in the appropriate form. It was determined that the literacy books prepared by the state were not sufficient, and it was suggested that they should be better equipped with higher quality drawings, more concrete words, more appropriate figure sand more a esthetically prepared visual figures. It was determined that the students who migrated due to lack of Turkish language skills had difficulty in under standing what they read. In conclusion, it can be suggested that non-linguistic leiter intelligence test can be applied with the cooperation of psychological counsel or and Arabic teacher in order to determine learning difficulties in some immigrants. In order to improve language skills in the preschool period, children from 3 years of age who are immigrants who do not speak our language can be provided with gradual pre school education. Workshops on peer bullying for students, creative drama activities for parents can be done and adaptation problems can be eliminated and cultural integration can be achieved.


Keywords


Multilingual classes, literacy teaching, İmmigrant students

Author : Nurhüda SÖZEN
Number of pages: 2047-2062
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.29228/TurkishStudies.41926
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Turkish Studies-Educational Sciences
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