Opinions of teacher candidates on elementary literacy teaching

Abstract

This study was performed in order to determine the opinions of 4th Grade Classroom Teaching Department students on elementary literacy teaching. Screening model was used in the study. Data were collected by the questionnaire form developed by Kola (2010). Having the answers to open-ended questions reviewed via content analysis method, and having the data from field --- assessed, answers from students were thereby collected under different themes. Frequency (f) and percentage (P) values of all those data were assessed. As a result of the research, it was ascertained that, most of the teacher candidates expressed opinions on elementary literacy teaching to be practical, however it was further ascertained they were concerned particularly due to being inexperienced in elementary literacy teaching, and they would like to teach 1st and 3rd grades the most in their first year in teaching. Besides, teacher candidates stated that, specializing in the main field would on one hand be beneficial both in rendering better education to students, and better skills to teacher candidates, but on the other hand this might cause difficulties for teachers to go down to the level of students. Teacher candidates want to become specialized mostly in Maths and Turkish courses. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Prof. Huseyin Uzunboylu.