Abstract:

Although italic handwriting improves the intellectual and linguistic skills of students, such as thinking, understanding, colocation, assessment and correlation, a tendency not to use italic handwriting is seen among some students. The purpose of this research is to determine the reasons for not using italic handwriting among sixth grade students. For this purpose, three hundred and sixty six students from three secondary schools in Adiyaman, chosen by Stratified Sampling Method, has been examined whether they use italic handwriting, along with the gender variable, in the 2012-2013 academic year. It has been seen that 39,9 % of the students partici- pated in the survey do not use italic handwriting. It has also been determined that the 49,3 % of this rate is female and 50,7 % is male. The research data has been ob- tained by asking the open-end question “If you do not use the italic hand writing, would you write the reasons for this?” to the one hundred and forty six students who do not use italic handwriting. The data has been examined by the Content Analysis technique. It has been determined that the sixth grade students do not use italic handwriting due to the reasons such as taking negatory attitude aganist italic hand- writing, widespread use of plain text, difficulty in using italic handwriting, the italic handwriting type being not readable and teachers’ effects. Making the secondary school teachers conscious regarding the italic handwriting, updating class teachers on difficulties that the students experience and trying to generalize the italic hand- writing not only in schools but also outside of schools may assure the students to use italic handwriting.

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