Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Milli Egitim, sa.171, ss.109-129, 2006 (Scopus)
The Ministry of National Education has started radical changes in 1st to 5th grade primary curriculum in 2004. The curriculum for Life Sciences, Turkish, Mathematics, Social Sciences and Science and Technology courses are redeveloped considering the facts and concepts of the new age. The new curriculum that have piloted at 120 schools in 9 cities in 2004-2005 school year will be in use all over the country starting from the 2005-2006 school year. Together with the new Turkish curriculum, early reading instruction method was also changed. The whole language method having been used since 1981 was abandoned and the phonics (phoneme based) method was introduced. The change in early reading method surprised everyone and many teachers got suspicious about and criticized the change because the whole language method had been promoted to be the best method for years. This study has two aims. The first is to collect the opinions of teachers, who taught early reading in pilot schools in 2004-2005 school year, about the phonics. The other is to compare the performance of students who were taught to read using the phonics method in pilot schools and those who were taught to read using the whole language method in non-pilot schools in terms of reading pace, reading accuracy and reading comprehension. For this purpose, items were developed to be asked in a questionnaire regarding the comparison of early reading instruction methods and a reading test was developed to compare the performance of students who were taught reading with different methods. The items were responded by 56 first grade teachers at 29 pilot schools in 6 cities. The reading test was administered to 386 students in 4 pilot and 4 non-pilot schools in Kocaeli. A majority of teachers have very positive opinions about the phonics. They stated that students who were taught to read using the phonics could start reading earlier and as a mass, comprehend what they read better and have higher creativity and self expression skills. A majority of the teachers declared that the students who learnt reading using the whole language method could read faster. The results of the reading test are in concord with the opinion of the teachers and put forward that the phonics cause slower but better understanding in reading. The students of phonics make more suffix mistakes but for the other types of mistakes, no difference was observed.