Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language

by Furkan Şevket Kır

After reading an article by Prof. Dr. Sinan Bayraktaroğlu about why Turkish should be taught as a foreign language, I started searching the Internet to see what I can find about it. Turns out there is quite a lot going on in Turkey and abroad alike. The first thing I found was that some universities offer MA Programs in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language. Some of them are:

Hacettepe University http://www.turkiyat.hacettepe.edu.tr/eng/YDTMAGAR.pdf

Dokuz Eylül University http://www.deu.edu.tr/ders-katalog/tr/bolum_8955_tr.html

Başkent University http://egbilens.baskent.edu.tr/programlar/tyo_tezli/index.html

Yıldız Technical University http://www.sbe.yildiz.edu.tr/bolumler/bolum/41

Gazi University http://egtbil.gazi.edu.tr/posts/view/title/lisansustu-ogrenci-alimi!-73264

The second thing I found was a little more surprising to me. There is something called Association of American Turkic Teachers. On its website, you can find a lot of information about Turkish Instruction in the US including job advertisements for Turkish language instructors. What is required for those jobs is generally a Master’s Degree in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language and a few years of teaching experience on tertiary level. (And of course native-like Turkish and English competency). You would be surprised to see how many universities offer Turkish language courses. (For a specific list, please go to http://turkishstudies.org/turkish_in_the_us/language_instruction.shtml)

As for why someone would want to have an MA degree and teach Turkish as a foreign language, the first reason I can think of is that it is a very new area that needs a lot of developing. Two things that are needed in this field are qualified language instructors and good material developers not only to develop high quality textbooks but also to develop language material for learners to make use of outside the classroom such as listening materials, graded books etc.

Of course, quite a few books have been published for foreigners, for example, by TÖMER (Turkish and Foreign Languages Research and Application Center of Ankara University) and by a few more institutions and individual authors but I don’t think we have as many alternatives as we would find for most European languages. (A list of books for learning Turkish can be found here.) There is no need to argue that the more variety we have, the better because we need options to find what is best for us and our learners. From what I hear, most instructors end up doing a lot of adaptation or creating their own materials.

I talked about this issue with my Spanish teacher here at METU who started learning Turkish at a university in the US a few years ago. As a language instructor herself, she said that their instructor could not find any good quality book to use in class and they had to follow what we would call a book from the Grammar Translation era. (It was a pile of photocopies thicker than two encyclopedias put together. And my teacher had to divide it into two because it was too heavy to carry around every day).

As I briefly mentioned above, there are not many qualified instructors who are trained to teach Turkish to foreigners, either. Based on what I found on the Internet, most American universities hire Turkish native speakers although they have completely different academic interests, for example, a graduate student majoring in Middle East Studies. In Turkey, the instructors who teach Turkish to foreign students are generally graduates of Turkish literature departments with various academic interests since there is no undergraduate program that focuses solely on teaching Turkish to foreigners and the graduate programs have opened only recently. And I agree with Bayraktaroğlu when he says just because someone is competent in the literature or grammar of a language, it doesn’t mean they can teach it, much less to foreigners.

As Bayraktaroğlu pointed out in his article, another important point is the establishment of language competencies and benchmarks as well as standardized testing of the Turkish language. A few steps have been taken to serve this purpose. Yunus Emre Enstitüsü was established in 2007, which, according to its website, is in the process of preparing a Turkish language pack including a series of textbooks, reading books, and audio-visual materials based on the Common European Framework. Moreover, an international proficiency exam was administered for the first time in 2012 in 10 countries (Kosovo, Albania, Egypt, Iran, Azerbaijan, Japan, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belgium, Kazakhstan) and another one in 2013 in 9 countries (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia/Tatarstan), Kazakhstan, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina)

(For more information: http://www.yee.org.tr/turkiye/tr/turkce-yeterlik-sinavi)

I didn’t know until very recently that this much was happening. I hope it gets wider and better in time to include more countries. What is needed is a little more advertisement maybe.

Another point worth mentioning is that teaching Turkish to foreigners is not very far from our field as graduates of ELT programs. In fact, you would be making use of almost all your academic background because although we focus on English, we study (or studied) language teaching. You would only be adapting that background knowledge to the specific characteristics of Turkish.

All the academic reasons aside, I think it would be really fun to teach our language to foreigners and introduce them to our culture to help change the image of our country and people in their minds, if there is any.