Views on Complaints and Apologies in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language


BAYAT N.

PAMUKKALE UNIVERSITESI EGITIM FAKULTESI DERGISI-PAMUKKALE UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, sa.41, ss.1-16, 2017 (ESCI) identifier

Özet

The aim of this study is to find out the strategies used by Turkish language learners for complaining and apologizing. The participants of this descriptive research consist of two different groups. The first one consists of 29 foreign students attending to TOMER for learning Turkish at a university in Turkey. The second group consists of 25 students in the Turkish language education department who were included in the study to determine the strategies used in their complaints and apologies in their mother tongue. In total there were 60 participants in the study. The data collection instrument was a discourse completion test consisting of eight items including four complaint and four apology contexts. The participants wrote a statement reflecting their actions of complaining and apologizing within the context, depending on the situations given in the test. The expressions written in the analysis process are associated with a specific strategy in relation to the content. Content analysis was done by two different evaluators. The inter-rater reliability was calculated to be .91. According to the results of the research, it was determined that there are significant differences between the native speakers and the foreign students in terms of the strategies used for complaints, but also similarities in terms of strategies of apologizing. Within the framework of the results obtained, it is suggested that cultural and practical dimensions should be given importance in teaching Turkish as a foreign language.