Abstract:

Questions have a special importance in educational settings and especially in Turkish language teaching as they mobilize thinking, allow thinkers to reach to truths, have a key role in accessing the meaning of texts and also function as the main tool of measurement and evaluation. In this study, the questions that are related to reading and listening texts in Turkish course books and are listed under the titles of reading/comprehension and listening/comprehension are examined. The questions have been approached based on whether they are remembering questions whose answers can be accessed by the surface of the text or understanding-comprehension questions whose answers can be extracted by the deep structure of the text with the use of cognitive processes. The Turkish course books in this study are restricted to the th grade course book prepared by the Ministry of National Education Commission, and the texts are restricted to two types, namely the informative and narrative texts. For the surface-structure questions a parallelism to the remembering level questions of Bloom's taxonomy (as revised by his student Anderson in 2002) is drawn, whereas for the deep-structure questions a parallelism to the understanding level questions of the same taxonomy is drawn. It is demonstrated by the findings that the ratio of remembering-level questions to total questions is 36%, the ratio of understanding-level questions is 39% and the ratio of questions belonging to other levels is 25%. Based on the result that the distribution ratio of the examined remembering and understanding questions is very close to each other, the study concludes with suggestions to increase the ratio of understanding level questions.

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