Using mnemonic illustrations in first reading and writing: The case of Turkish alphabet

This study aims to create mnemonic illustrations for the letters in the Turkish alphabet to be used at the stage of first reading and writing in the first grade. The principles of Pavio\u27s Dual Coding Theory and Sweller et al.\u27s Cognitive Load Theory were used in the creation of mnemonic letters. This study was designed as a qualitative research in which photo-elicitation method was used in data collection. The study group of the research consists of 25 classroom teachers and 300 students who completed pre-school education and were about to start primary school. The data collection process of the research was carried out in two steps, the first one being data collection from classroom teachers, and the second one is gathering data from students who were about to start the first grade. As a result of the analysis of the data obtained from the research, visuals of objects whose name begins with each of the 28 letters of the 29 letters in the Turkish alphabet were determined based on certain criteria and mnemonic illustrations were created. Since there is no word in Turkish which begins with (ğ), the remaining letter, an object whose name ends with this letter was used as a mnemonic illustration. As a result, mnemonic illustrations were created for all of the lowercase letters of the 29 letters in the Turkish alphabet and 28 of the uppercase letters except one. In the findings section of the study, mnemonic illustrations for two uppercase and two lowercase letters were presented to provide an example