The Problems in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language and Solution Problems

The Problems in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language and Solution Problems

Esra Birsen, Guler

The number of the people who has been learning Turkish has been increasing of late years. However their reasons in learning Turkish has been changing a lot. Due to these increase, a lot of places have been established under the name of “Turkish Course, Turkish Culture Center”. In this paper, some of the problems in “Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language” will be mentioned and some of the keys will be proposed: 1. Lecturer Case: As its has been expressed in lots of sources, a person who speaks Turkish is not always a person who can teach it properly. If so, to know a language does not mean always you can teach it. That kind of beliefs unfortunately would reduce the public esteem for Turkish. In order to avoid this, the language teachers should be aware of the details, specialities of the language. Otherwise, they cant express the originality of Turkish and would teach only “a translation language” Turkish. 2. Source Case: With the incerease in number of the people who are learning Turkish, a lot of sources has been published in that area. Most of them are written by the people who have hardly experiences in the area. Because of this, most of the sources can’t answer language teachers and learners needs. In most of the books, its neglected to put exact rules in Turkish. If we put rules as much as possible, the time in learning language would be shorter, and the result would be better. For instance, because the place of the answers can change the mean of the sentence in Turkish, some of students have some difficulties while answering questions about where to put the answer. In order to avoid this difficulty, we can say “You should put the answer the place of the question word.” “Dün arabayla nereye gittin?” “Dün arabayla işe gittim.” The rules would make the language teaching and learning duration easier and funnier. Fort the native Turkish speakers to put rules can be seen unimportant, for he Turkish learners putting that kind of rules are so essential. 3. Pupil Case: Before starting the language teaching activities, we should beter consider “the pupils” properly. Firstly, their levels should be found out, then the points of why she/he is learning the language, whats her/ his needs and what the mother tongue of her/him is as well. These datas will help in preaparing the teaching plan. For instance, a boss and a housewife’s needs are very different in a new language. Because of this, if the needs of the students are found out properly, the needs can be answered as it should be. 4. Designation Case: Generally, adjective “foreign” is used for the pupils who has been learning Turkish. But instead of using that adjective for pupils, we’d beter use it for the language. Otherwise, unconsciously, the Turkish learnes is isolated.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

797