Abstract:

The main purpose of the act of writing is to express thoughts and feelings in writing. Written expression is a multi-faceted, complex and difficult process that requires many sub-skills. On the basis of expression, there are words and phrases in meaningful language relationship. Comprehension and expression skills’ efficient use depends on capacity words. The purpose of the study is to determine whether there is a relationship between middle school 8th grade and high school in the 11th grade level of students' written expression performances and the words that they used in their compositions and whether it differs according to grade level of students. The study is a descriptive study on survey model. In the study, 201 from the 8th grade in middle school, 177 students from the 11th grade in high school were asked to write a composition. Compositions were analyzed in two steps. In the first step, the compositions students wrote were scored 3 times including analytical measurement tool two times and once with a holistic measurement tool. Written expression performance is calculated by taking the arithmetic mean of these three scoring. In the second step, each composition has been examined in terms of some variables , except ‘performance’, such as "total number of words", "the number of simple, compound and derived words", "the number of misspelled words" , "the number western origin words", "the number of words in the longest and shortest sentences" and these values have been obtained. Spearman correlation coefficients were calculated for numeric data collected in two steps and Mann-Whitney U test was performed for comparison of these two grade levels. According to the results, 11th grade students’ composition performances are higher than 8th grade ones. 11th grade students wrote longer compositions using more words than 8th grade students. İt is observed that 11th grade students use simple and compound words, 8th grade students use simple sentences rather than compound sentences. It is hoped that this study draw attention to how important the words are in written expression performance.

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