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This study primarily aims to evaluate preschool teachers' early literacy proficiency and in-class literacy practices based on child outputs. The study comprises 29 preschool teachers working in Gaziantep and 235 students continuing their education in these teachers' classes. The 'Teacher Interview Form' was used in the study to collect information regarding teachers' early literacy proficiency and in-class literacy practices, while the 'Early Literacy Test (EROT)' was used to assess children's early literacy skills. All of the teacher interviews and EROT applications were conducted individually in a designated room or classroom at their own school. The data obtained from the study were calculated and analyzed by the Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis H test. The findings revealed that there was no significant difference between the teacher's early literacy proficiency and the children's early literacy subtest scores, that there was a significant difference between the in-class literacy practices and children's receptive and expressive language vocabulary subtest scores, and there was no significant difference between the children's phonological awareness subtest scores and listening comprehension skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey's most recent primary English language curriculum, which highlights oral skills, mandates communicative English language teaching to young English language learners. Recent primary English curriculum comprises two hours per week of Englishas-a-foreign language (EFL) instruction to include listening and speaking only for Grade 2 and very limited reading and writing for Grade 3 onward. While communicative skills are highly emphasized, literacy skills are kept on the back burner as reading and writing are incorporated gradually with minimal reading and writing at earlier grade levels and some literacy practices at upper grade levels. Successful emergent literacy development in English highly depends on young language learners' phonological (e.g. alliteration, rhyme), phonemic (i.e. sound manipulation), and orthographic awareness (i.e. spelling conventions) in English. The present study investigates to what extent Turkey's locally-designed primary EFL coursebooks--used in 2018-2021 academic period--cater to the early literacy needs of young learners at grades two, three, and four. The study explores early literacy content in coursebooks in a mixed-methods design: qualitatively with the descriptive content analysis and quantitatively with the frequency of early literacy constructs. The results of those analyses reveal primary English coursebooks do not promote a linguistically sound and pedagogically appropriate integration of literacy skills according to principles of second language (L2) literacy acquisition at primary levels. Turkey's misaligned early English literacy curriculum, in its current state, sends alarming messages to foreign language policymakers, material designers, and EFL educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]