A Phenomenological Study of Teacher Perceptions of the Applicability of Differentiated Reading Instruction Designs in Turkey

The main purpose of the present study is determining the practicability of the 'Differentiated Reading Instruction Approach' in primary school grades in Turkey, in accordance with the teachers' perceptions, by considering important roles in the practice of the approach. The work-group of the present research is in phenomenology design, which is one of the qualitative research designs, formed by 17 class teachers selected via maximum variety sampling from various geographic regions of Turkey. Findings of the present research revealed that the present implementations of the teachers are far from taking students' individual differences into consideration and therefore they don't comply with the basic principles of differentiated teaching. In addition, at the end of the seminars, which included the theoretical foundations and implementation oriented samples of this approach, it was determined that most of the teachers stated that this approach cannot be implemented in Turkey. Consequently, examination of the teachers' differentiated reading teaching designs revealed that these designs were realized in a successful way that complies with the theoretical foundations of the approach in terms of content, process and production.