An Examination on the Visuals in the Reading Texts of the Turkish Teaching Textbooks for Foreigners

Abstract

There are various textbook sets commonly used in teaching Turkish to foreigners. In the literature, the literary content of these books has been examined by many researchers. However, there have not been enough studies on the visuals, which are as important as the texts in the books. The visuals belonging to the texts in the Gazi University Turkish Textbook for Foreigners Level C1 were examined in this research. In this study, document review method, which is one of the qualitative research designs, was used and 39 visuals used with 20 texts in the book were examined by the researcher and 3 experts in terms of their compatibility with the content of the texts. The visuals in the book were first grouped according to Levin's (1981) typology and it was determined that 97.42% of the visuals are representative and appropriately decorative. Then, the compatibility of the images with the texts was examined according to a five-item category list. It has been determined that helpful visuals are used in the book to predict the subject of the text, which is compatible with the content of the text. However, it has been concluded that the visuals are found insufficient to contribute to the comprehensibility of the text, to emphasize the important points in the text, and to support the main idea/emotion of the text. Suggestions were made regarding the use of organizational, explanatory and transformational visuals that contribute more to the understanding of the text in Turkish as a foreign language books.