Abstract:

The purpose of the present study is to describe the diversity and frequency of rhetorical relations that ensure the consistency in informative texts in middle school (5^th, 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grades) Turkish language textbooks. Semantic relations in the texts were examined within the framework of Rhetoric Structure Theory, and the outlook of rhetorical relations were defined according to grade levels. Only informative texts in written form were selected from the textbooks and the selection of informative texts is based on the classification determined by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE). In the present study, paragraphs were considered as the basic unit, and the rhetorical relation outlooks that provided the consistency in the whole paragraphs and in the paragraph backgrounds were presented in the tables. It was observed that the relations used in the texts mostly made explicit the text types and the rhetorical relations differed in terms of frequency and diversity distribution according to grade levels.

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