Abstract:

Written expression is one of the most effective tools that an individual may apply to express himself/herself in a proper and relevant way to the purpose. The meaning of a writing subject to a person takes an important place in bringing writing skills to the desired level. When selected topics are among those that students can make sense, make comments on, exemplify, have foreknowledge about and those which are within their interest and often encountered in their daily lives, it is expected that a student writes more comfortably. However, the perception of abstract and concrete subjects by students differs from each other even they are selected from daily life. The purpose of this research is to compare writing skills of fifth grade students, who are in the process of passing from the concrete stage to abstract stage, in terms of number of words and sentences, sentence length, methods to develop the idea and genres. For this purpose, 32 fifth grade students from Yumurtalık Secondary School in the province of Adana were asked to write compositions on concrete and abstract subjects and the collected texts were examined through document analysis. In the research, it was detected that the numbers of students’ words and sentences in abstract subjects were more in comparison with concrete subjects but the number of different words used and the average sentence length increased in concrete subjects. It was determined that the students employed methods to develop their ideas mostly in concrete subjects; they mostly included metaphors in concrete subjects, on the other hand, they mostly included exemplifications in abstract subjects. The literary genre that they mostly preferred on concrete subjects was essay, whereas story was the genre mostly written on abstract subjects

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