Abstract:

In the education of Turkish as a foreign language, an important type of effective learning is cultural transfer. Grammar and vocabulary represent the mathematical and rational aspects of language, while cultural transfer represents its literary, artistic and abstract aspects. Just as with the richness of being familiar with his/her own culture, the student who has mastered the culture of another society easily learns the logical system, structural functioning, historical development, flow and rules of his language in daily life. A student who understands the strong bond between language and culture, increases his/her internal motivation in language learning and finds answers to his/her questions about the functioning of language from within life. As the carrier of culture, language approaches the art, philosophy, belief system and literature of that society with a deeper perspective. For all these reasons, cultural awareness studies should be implemented in order to give the students in our country the opportunity to understand the life of the society in which they learned the language, the values shaped by a historical process, the system of thought and belief, and the production of art and literature in order to learn Turkish. In our study, it is also aimed to contribute to the Turkish teaching curriculum in line with the results by determining the awareness level of the Turkish society and culture of the foreign students who are in our country to learn Turkish. For this purpose, questions including demographic information were asked to 30 students studying Turkish at Istanbul Medeniyet University Turkish Teaching Center and Istanbul Okan University Language Center. Six faculty members who teach at Turkish Teaching Centers were also asked questions about the cultures of the students they teach. Case study, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in our research. The purpose of case studies is to best understand a particular situation, issue, problem, limited to a specific time and parameters, to provide an in-depth understanding. Demographic questionnaire and open-ended questions were used as data collection method.