The effect of teaching the alphabet with onomatopoeia on writing skills in Turkish lessons for foreigners

Abstract

One of the difficulties in teaching Turkish, which is a phonetically rich language, to foreigners, is that similar sounds are often confused with each other. Since even a single punctuation mark is crucial for writing and reading Turkish letters (ı-i, o-ö, u-ü, c-ç, g-ğ, s-ş, etc.), students who use the Arabic alphabet have great difficulty writing and pronouncing Turkish words correctly. The difficulties that foreigners have in spelling vowels (ı-i, o-ö, u-ü) and consonants (c-ç, g-ğ, m-n, s-ş) when learning Turkish also have a negative impact on their writing and speaking skills. Especially in essay writing classes, students often misspell words, which makes it necessary to determine and implement more effective strategies in alphabet lessons. When teaching the Turkish alphabet, it is of great importance that the teacher uses “onomatopoeia,” which is considered an important feature of Turkish, to overcome this problem. In this study, the effect of onomatopoeia, the word corresponding to sounds in nature, on writing skills in Turkish classes for foreigners was investigated. This study, taken from a class of nine students at the Afyon Kocatepe University Turkish Language Teaching Centre at A1 level in the semesters of 2013–2014, was based on the analysis of three essays written by the students before and after studying onomatopoeia. The analysis of the data revealed that teaching the alphabet with onomatopoeic words was effective for the students in terms of the letters whose spellings were confused with each other and made a significant contribution to the writing skills of foreigners.

Keywords: Teaching Turkish as a foreign language, alphabet, onomatopoeia, writing.

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