The Skills of Turkish Teacher Candidates to Use the Functions of Language in the Narrative Texts

Communication is an important part of our life. The realization of the communication and the achievement of its purpose is possible by understanding the function of the linguistic units used by the speaker or the text producer. In this case, the communication functions of the language, which is an important part of communication, must be known/recognised. Linguists, sociologists, and psychologists have taken different approaches to classify the functions of language. One of these approaches is the classification made by Roman Jakobson from the Prague linguistics school. Jakobson considers exchanging information between addresser and addressee as an essential element in communication. He also states that language has six functions: expressiveness, referent, call, relationship, metalanguage function and artistic function. In this research, the narrative texts of Turkish teacher candidates were examined in terms of the functions of the language by using Jakobson's approach. The model of the research is case study as it covers both the collection of field-based data, and the process is related to evaluations. Data were collected through documents during the process. The documents of the research are the narrative texts prepared by the 2nd year Turkish Language Teaching students studying at a state university within the scope of the linguistics course. The results of the study showed that there is a significant difference between the pre-service teachers' use of language functions in the narrative texts they wrote before learning Roman Jakobson's classification of language functions and the narrative texts they wrote after learning.