THE REQUIREMENT OF PRAGMATIC AWARENESS IN TURKISH LESSONS

Abstract

It is very important forsuccessful communication that the individual who constitutes the first goal in language teaching can express her/ himself completely and use the target language in accordance with her/his purpose. In this direction, it is expected that the receiver can interpret the utterances, sentences / linguistic - non-linguistic signs in accordance with the purpose of production and successfully perform the communication or information action with the utterances s/he has formed according to the context in order to pass to the sender stage. The individual who develops awareness about implicit structures while acquiring his/her native language will be able to learn other languages more easily and efficiently. These rules, which are unconsciously applied by language sharers, need to be consciously conveyed to learners by Turkish teachers.

In the study, the activities in the 5th grade (Anıttepe Publishing), 6th, 7th and 8th grade (MEB Publications) Turkish textbooks were evaluated in order to embody the importance of pragmatics practices in the development of language skills. The process was carried out according to the basic qualitative research design, and the data collected by the document analysis technique were interpreted with a descriptive analysis approach by making additions to the illocutionary category in J. L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory and J. R. Searle’s classification. In the activities examined, 21 illocutionary values for the 5th grade, 10 for the 6th grade, 11 for the 7th grade, and 16 for the 8th grade were reached. It was concluded that the activities should be expanded to include different contexts and reinforced with repetitive structures, since the performance words were not found and their types were not sufficient. It is thought that the participation of expert linguists in the Turkish teaching departments and in the commission that prepares the secondary school Turkish textbooks will contribute to the elimination of this problem.