Teaching Turkish From Multicultural Perspectives

Teaching Turkish From Multicultural Perspectives

Ökten, Celile E.

This study explains why multicultural in-service teacher training is important for teachers, who teach Turkish as a foreign language, and proposes approaches for their professional development. This in-service training is required for the purpose of constructing improved communication between teacher and students. The theoretical framework was based on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory. It provides social and cultural basis of teaching through social mediation that provides teachers with a flexible instructional environment. This flexibility gives teachers several opportunities such as “modelling, contingency management, cognitive structuring, task structuring”, etc. The research was conducted in Mustafa Germirli Anadolu İmam Hatip Lisesi, Kayseri, which was one of the multinational high schools sponsored by Ministry of National Education and Turkish Religious Affairs Foundation. This qualitative study examined the attitudes and beliefs of teachers towards language education in a multicultural environment. The five study participants were in-service, high school Turkish language teachers, who have made efforts to match the curricular objectives with students' needs. Data were collected through semi-structured, face-to-face interviews using open-ended questions and classroom observation sheets. As a result of interpretive analysis, we focused on understanding how in-service learning process could be shaped on behalf of professional growth, and could be more responsively implemented through multicultural education. Implementation of national curriculum, adaptation of textbooks, culturally adjusted activities, student writing portfolios based on CEFR were all responsibilities of teachers that they had to take care at multicultural instruction. We also studied how they adjusted to these components of instruction through facilitations and collaborations they themselves discovered at this in-service learning process.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05-04

850