This paper deals with systems of singularly perturbed ordinary differential equations with a first order turning point. Two-point boundary conditions are attached. We treat interior turning points and boundary turning points and give in each case an estimate for the norm of the inverse of the differential operator. In both cases these norms tend to infinity, as the perturbation parameter a tends to zero. In the case of a boundary turning point, the norm of the inverse blows up algebraically, as $\varepsilon ^{{{ - 1} /2}} $, and in the interior turning point case, the blow-up is exponential, as $\varepsilon ^{{{ - 1} /2}} \exp ({\omega /{2\varepsilon }})$ with $\omega > 0$. For linear and quasilinear problems we prove existence (and uniqueness) results and investigate the asymptotic behavior of the solutions as $\varepsilon \to 0$. In the boundary turning point case, we show that solutions are uniformly bounded in compact subsets of the open interval and converge there uniformly (as $\varepsilon > 0$), to the solution of the reduced equation ($\varepsilon = 0$). At both boundary points, layers of height $O(\varepsilon ^{{{ - 1} /2}} )$ occur generally. In the interior turning point case the solutions generally blow up exponentially (at least left or right from the turning point).