Özet:

Narratives provide the reader with simulated experiences to perceive fictional character’s consciousness and the reflection of his/her emotions. By these characteristics, narrative texts become an important educational tool to support social development by establishing commonality between individuals with no similar experiences, as well as emotional development in understanding the others’ mind. Narrative empathy, which is defined as a part of the interaction between the text and the reader and a psychological mechanisms of the experience to relate a fictional text, is supported by various linguistic structures and uses in the text. One of the goals of mother tongue education is the development of the affective domain, that includes such skills as associating and organizing emotions and developing social understanding. In this regard, the purpose of the current study was to examine the fictional narrative texts in the Turkish textbook, a basic material in Turkish education, whether they supported empathy development in readers. In the study, the fiction texts in the Turkish 5th grade textbook were described in terms of narrator typology, frequency, diversity and contextual themes of mental verbs, and metaphor use. In addition, the study focused on activities in the textbook that encouraged readers to empathize. The findings indicated that the third person narrator in the narrative texts in the Turkish textbook, emotion verbs in mental verbs described with cognition, emotion, and perception, as well as metaphors to describe the other’s mental states were high in frequency. Finally, the texts included self-reference questions and indirect strategies directing the reader to empathize with the character.

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