Exploring the Prospective Teachers' Views about Writing Topic Selection and Their Writing Skills

The study aims to reveal the students’ -the prospective teachers for this study- the views about writing topic selection and their writing skills. This study employs phenomenological qualitative research design. The study group consists of fourty prospective teachers studying in the Turkish Language Teaching program. The reason why they were selected as the study group is that they completed the written expression and writing training courses, and their experiences in writing were optimum. In the analysis of the data, the content analysis method and NVivo 11 Pro program were used. The first finding from the study was about writing topic selection. Four categories emerged from the prospective teachers’ views regarding writing topic selection: disciplines, emotions, currency, and individuals. The most cited main category among these is emotions. The emotions main category is further divided into subcategories: romance, love, longing, misery, loneliness, joy of life, breaking up, happiness, fear and motivation. The main category of discipline ranked second following emotions. This theme encompassed the categories of education, language, literature, philosophy and history. The prospective teachers mostly wrote about education and literature. The main category of currency was split into two categories, i.e. social problems and current events, while individuals main category into four: family, friendship, your own life and people. Five categories emerged from the prospective teachers’ views regarding writing skill: psychology, competence, creation, expression and benefit. The most cited categories were psychology and expression.