Abstract:

Language is a living being providing agreement among people, owning peculiar laws, and having a growing presence only within the boundaries of these laws. The foundation of language was laid in an unknown time in the very past. The having rules in itself, language is a system that emerged historically. It is widely known that a language includes many rules, yet it hosts exceptions as well. Turkish, among the other languages, is considered as a language in which exceptions are nominated highly scarce.  In language teaching, especially in the teaching of a foreign language it is important that exceptions be taught. This study focuses on the concept of "exception" in terms of teaching Turkish as a foreign language and analyzes the exceptions in the present tense suffixes. Basing on a long tradition in the Turkish language, the cause of the occurrence of exceptions is thought to be caused by the interaction with different cultures and the presence of borrowed words. The study focuses on “gel-, bil-, öl-, gör, al-, bul-, ol-, ver-, var-, kal-, vur-, dur-, san-“, which are regarded as exception in the simple tense. It is of a higher possibility that even anyone who does not know the reasonings of why these 13 exceptions occur in the language, any learner learning Turkish as their mother tongue will be conjugating those verbs correctly. On the contrary, in the field of Teaching Turkish as a foreign language, students, who encounter with Turkish for the first time and cannot not go beyond the rules they have learned, are prone to make mistakes conjugating these exceptional verbs and are more likely to follow the standard and existing rules. This problem will make it difficult to teach Turkish as a foreign language. By way of referencing the issues abovementioned, the study investigates the matter of exceptions in teaching Turkish as a foreign language focusing on the simple present tense suffixes. The study concludes with the inference that students should be given the list of those exceptional verbs and there is a need to consolidate the use of these verbs through the samples. Key words: Teaching Turkish as a foreign language, exception, present tense.

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