Recent changes
Until 1997 children were required to attend school for 5 years. From 1997 to 2012 this increased to 8 years. Now it is 12 years. Pre-primary education is optional. Children get a Primary diploma after 8 years. The first 4 years of primary is definitely held in school. After that there is the option of continuing at another school or at home, which has been widely criticised.
I'm not sure exactly how the 'at home' option works because homeschooling is not a popular issue (and has been illegal) unlike in some other countries. Homeschooling is quite popular in the US, for instance. Other options after 4 years of compulsory schooling are attending a religious school or vocational school.
The new ruling has been widely criticized because parents have to make choices about their children's educational futures a younger age now, actually at age 9 or 10, before their real abilities are clear. Also many people think it is a not-very-secret way to take girls out of mixed education and put them in religious schools with single sex education.
There is an interesting article about the Turkish reforms in the New York Times and another in the Financial Times.
One of the criticisms of the new 4+4+4 system is that the government is trying to increase the number of religious schools, called Imam Hatip schools. For more information about this issues look here. These schools are being opened in other countries and international students come to Turkey to attend them, too. An interesting book review also provides some more information.
One result of the new system is that children start primary school one year younger, at 5 instead of 6 or even 7, however teachers did not receive training in how to teach to younger pupils. Many parents (myself included) chose to keep their children out for that extra year in spite of the threat of fines.
What do they learn at Primary?
General information can be found on the Internet. What concerns us is language education so I'll restrict myself to information relevant to literacy in the mother tongue and foreign languages.Turkish children now learn to write Turkish script first, not printed letters. The first books they read are written in a handwriting font. You can download the fonts from this website.
Turkish is very phonetic. Children learn letters, syllables and then put the syllables together to form words. If they can read syllables correctly, they can read (at least this is the attitude I see in many Turkish primary school teachers.) Children are timed regularly in Grade 1 to see how many words they can read out loud in 60 seconds. Did they understand what they read? That's not entirely clear to me! I suspect it depends on the teacher whether comprehension is checked. There is little or no awareness of pre-reading or post-reading activities in Turkish language classes, which affects some of our teachers who teach a foreign language. They often replicate the methodology and ask children to read English texts out loud without relevant pre-reading and often with no post-reading activity.
Parents are explicitly told not to teach their children to read in Turkish before they start school because 'they will be bored'. There is no differentiated learning and I have never seen stations being used by a class teacher. Children sit in rows from Grade 1 and are expected to adjust to 'normal' didactic instruction. I cannot see evidence of teachers being aware of multimodal literacy or even telling stories in class. In Turkish or in English. (Of course there must be exceptions.)
Children have the same teacher for all 4 years of primary school. Most grown-ups remember their primary school teacher and may continue to pay regular visits to him/her even as adults.
The children may have another teacher come in for music or English in a state school if parents have paid extra for this.
Children are graded from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest mark. Lessons are 40 minutes long.
English teachers
Roles:
They should try to get on well with the class teacher, who in effect controls the classroom space and the relationship with parents. Some English teachers complain that when they visit the classes to teach, there is no empty space on the desk for their stuff. There may not be room on the walls for hanging up the children's English work. Other teachers have told me that if the class teacher complains that the children are hard to manage after the English classes, they can get into trouble. These issues put stress on English teachers.
There is rarely a dedicated English room except in wealthier, roomier schools.
Literacy:
English teachers are usually asked not to introduce any reading or writing in Grade 1 (or to wait until the second half of the school year) because the children are learning to read and write in Turkish. Because pre-school is not compulsory, most Turkish children do not learn to read until they are 6. It was 6 or 7 under the previous system.
Then the English teachers are not sure what their role is in teaching writing/penmanship because the handwriting conventions are different (and Turkish English teachers are not trained to teach penmanship in English, either.) Turkish doesn't have the letter Q, for instance. Should the English teachers 'teach' it? Should the teacher use script or printed letters in second grade? These issues have not been resolved yet and each school does it differently.
When I visit primary and also pre-school programs I try to encourage the teachers to start telling stories from pre-school onwards so the children get into the habit of listening to a story. This would make the process of learning to read easier. English teachers often complain that they can't tell a story in English easily because the children won't pay attention, won't sit still, etc. because they don't have this habit in L1. Many parents do not read to their children at home in their mother tongue so children are not used to listening to stories or looking at picture books. Many English teachers are unsure how to read to children - should they read the words on the page? Should they tell the story in their own words? Should they encourage children to interact while listening? How should the teacher respond to what children say/And afterwards should they use the story for the next activity (game, arts and crafts etc.) and if so, how?
Most YL teachers enjoy having sessions where they can discuss and practice these skills.
The 'discipline' issue
The word 'discipline' in Turkish basically means punishment. The Ministry of Education apparently (?) stipulates that teachers/schools cannot discipline children. Whenever I talk to principals about classroom management and the need for school-wide policies that all the teachers follow consistently, I am told that they are not allowed to discipline the children. Then I try to explain that I am not talking about punishment, but rather having expectations that children will not run in the corridors or in the canteen because it's dangerous, that no one hits or kicks anyone else, that everyone is responsible for creating a positive environment where all the pupils can learn. This doesn't seem to make much sense to some school administrators ..... Let's try to talk about these issues on courses if it comes up, OK?
For example, I once saw high school children hitting each other hard in middle of the back during an English lesson I was observing with a native speaker teacher. It was clearly painful (and actually it's dangerous.) When I brought this to the attention of the school authorities a few minutes later, they did nothing. I was told that this particular class was the 'sin bin'. Needless to say, that school has a very high turn over of native speaker teachers since they are not backed up.
Once when I presented some report findings in one school that basically many children can't learn because there are too many disruptions, and offered some possible solutions like including a behaviour management element such as Kelso in their teaching, the administration just gave me blank looks. This didn't make any sense to them. How can you teach little children non-violent problem solving strategies?
The number one complaint that I hear from foreign teachers is that there is no proper control and the kids can do whatever they like. For example, a 7th grader is running down the corridor and bumps into an American teacher who is carrying hot tea. She burns her hand and the student doesn't stop, doesn't apologise even when another teacher tells him to. These kinds of incidents tend to demoralise native speaker teachers.
I was reminded recently of the TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey) findings. Unfortunately Turkish teachers were not involved in this research. It would be interesting to replicate this research here.
"In about half of the TALIS-participating countries/economies, one in four teachers reports spending at least 30% of lesson time handling classroom disruptions and administrative tasks.. One in two teachers in Brazil, Malaysia and Singapore reports spending 15% or more of lesson time on keeping order in the classroom." - in some other countries one in four teachers reports spending at least 40% of lesson time on these tasks.
http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/TALIS-Teachers-Guide.pdf
Also take a look at this article.
Based on my and other trainers' and teachers' experiences, we created a sample behaviour management document and another document offering practical advice to teachers. Feel free to use them if you need them or share copies with any teacher who is interested.
If you have any other comments, please let me know and I will make changes to this post accordingly.
