Deniz AKDAL, Ayfer ŞAHİN*
**Fatih Sultan Mehmet Primary School Teacher, Kirşehir, Turkey.
***Corersponding Author, Dr. Ahi Evran University, Kirsehir- Turkey.

Abstract

Problem Statement: The aim of the first five years of primary school is to teach and help the students develop basic skills as stated in the Primary School Language Program and Guide. Creative thinking and intertextual reading are among these skills, and it is important to give these to the students during language courses.

Purpose of Study: The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of an intertextual reading approach on the improvement of writing skills among primary school fifth-grade students.

Methods: The “Pretest – Post-test with Control Group” experimental research model has been used. The sample for the study is comprised of fifth-grade students at Akpinar Primary School, located at Kirsehir. The “Creative Writing Rubric” has been used as the data gathering tool. The “Creative Writing Rubric” has eight subdimensions, namely Originality of Ideas, Fluency of Thoughts, Flexibility of Thoughts, Vocabulary Richness, Sentence Structure, Organization, and Writing Style and Grammar”. In this study, the creative writing works of the students have been examined and evaluated in terms of “Originality of Ideas” and “Vocabulary Richness”. One-Way Anova has been used to analyze the relations inside test and control groups and the interrelations between them. Normal distribution of the obtained data has been analyzed in order to determine the reason for the differences between groups. “Post-hoc” has been applied, and the “Scheffe” test’s results have been used.

Findings and Results: At the end of the study, it was found that the Originality of Ideas and the Vocabulary Richness scores of the students from the test group, to whom the intertextual reading approach had been applied, are higher than from the students of the control group, where the courses had been conducted conventionally. This difference is statistically significant. These results show that the intertextual reading approach that has been applied to the test group is effective for improving the creative writing skills of the students in terms of “including creative and original ideas” and “word selection” (using the words appropriately and in line with the purpose of the text and making right usage choices, etc.).

Conclusions and Recommendations: By using an intertextual reading approach, students’ thought generation as well as their formation of relations between ideas, have improved. Thus, by using these activities during the creative writing skill development process, original idea generation can be established. Texts studied using an intertextual approach create a significant difference in the creative writing of fifth-grade students in terms of word selection. Thus, through the higher connections made while applying intertextual reading, students learn more new words and can use them with different meanings, in the right places, and in line with their aims.

Keywords: Intertextuality, reading, intertextual reading, writing, creative writing