Consistency of the Narrative Texts Written by Middle School Students and Their Textual Creation Levels

Abstract

The present study aimed to identify and classify the consistency problems in the texts written by middle school 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students and to determine their textual levels. In the study, numerical data were also used within the context of descriptive analysis design, a qualitative research method. The study group included 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students attending two middle schools in Van province, located in the Eastern Anatolia Region in Turkey. Ten students were randomly selected from each grade level. The texts were analyzed by assigning codes to 40 participating students and their narrative texts based on the grade level. The analysis of the narrative texts written by the students was conducted with the "Narrative Text Consistency Scale," developed by the authors. The validity and reliability of the scale were determined based on the expert opinion. The texts written by the students were analyzed based on the scale by additional 3 faculty members. The study findings demonstrated that the students experienced consistency problems in narrative texts such as inability to precisely reflect the relations between events in the text, alteration of the narrative between the events narrated in the text and sudden transitions, contradictions and irrational transitions between the sections, the lack of a conclusion, inconsistencies about the protagonists, and non-identification of the characters in the story. It was also determined that the number of creative texts was 4, the number of successful texts was 8, the number of texts that could be accepted as a text partially was 9, the number of texts that could be considered in the phase of text creation was 12, and the number of texts that could not be accepted as texts was 7.