An analysis of writing activities in the student workbooks of a secondary-level Turkish language course

The purpose of this study is to analyze writing activities in the student workbooks of a secondary-level Turkish language course (grades 5 to 8) according to the principles of progressive writing. The study is descriptive and employs content analysis as a qualitative research paradigm. The writing activities of the books in this study all published by The Ministry of Education are categorized according to task, namely those involving sentence, paragraph and text-level writing; those focusing on spelling and punctuation; those which could not be categorized based on their instructions; and those based on their text types. The activities and their development from the 5 to 8th grades are examined. It is concluded that no principle of progression exists in the activities, except in those involving sentence-level writing tasks. Key words: Writing activities, Turkish language student workbooks, content analysis.