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Part 2 English Language Learning in Turkey 149 Chapter 8 An Overview of Research on Skills Instruction in Turkey Demet Yaylı, Pamukkale University For more than seven decades, the four skills – i.e., reading, writing, listening and speaking – have been of major concern in English Language Teaching (ELT) and related research. Although curricula and textbooks for English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) generally focus on one or two of the skills, there is a recent trend to integrate all four. Since actual com- munication rarely uses any one skill in isolation, integrating skills in the context of interactive and communicative teaching is the preferred approach. This chap- ter gives an overview of the research on skills instruction that has recently been conducted in Turkey; i.e., research on writing, reading, speaking, and listening respectively. Writing Modern second language (L2) writing instruction has moved from a focus on the correctness of text to the process of composing text in a communicative context (Leki, 2002). This constitutes a shift from writing as an object to writing as an activity. However, in spite of the acceptance of a communicative approach to ELT in Turkey (Kırkgöz, 2005) the time devoted to writing activities remains limited in public primary and secondary schools. The focus is still on the form rather than the process (Atay & Kurt, 2006b), never mind critical writing (See Canag- arajah, 2002) or the formation of an author’s identity in writing (see Hyland, 2003, and Raimes,...