Abstract
THE EFFECT OF EXERCISES BASED ON TONGUE TWISTER ACTIVITIES ON THE SPEAKING SKILLS OF SYRIAN ARABS WHO ARE LEARNING TURKISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Speaking skill the objective to be taught is required that sounds should be uttered correctly and effectively, the lexical items should be spoken by considering their tones, emphasis and intonation in language teaching, simultaneously reading, writing and listening skills. It is possible to develop these skills by continuous use of the target language. The features of pronunciation in their mother tongue of the students learning Turkish as a foreign language may cause them to have some problems while learning this language. It is useful to keep the interests of the students learning Turkish as a foreign language vivid and use some techniques to get over these difficulties. Tongue twisters almost in every culture take place among the important means to keep awake students’ interests and make the students utter the target language phonemes correctly. In this study, there is an evaluation of the use of tongue twisters to provide that Syrian Arab students learning Turkish should develop the pronunciation of the sounds not existing in their alphabet but existing in Turkish or having different meanings and speak Turkish fluently. With this aim, the sounds that Syrian Arab students have pronunciation problems are determined and students are provided to do pronunciation exercises with previously prepared tongue twisters. The sample of this study is formed by randomly chosen 15 Syrian students and high school graduates who wish to continue higher education and the people living in Adıyaman tent city region. In this study, single group pre-test and post- test of quantitative research model and observation of qualitative data collection techniques are included and an observational study has been realized. For the development of speaking skills of Syrian Arab students, video and sound recordings are used to determine what effects there are. As a result, it is determined that the use of tongue twisters improves the quality of teaching and permanence in Turkish teaching to Syrian Arab students and it also has an important function in language configuration by providing an enjoyable learning environment. There have been made suggestions from the research data.
Keywords
Teaching Turkish to foreigners, The instructors, The Course-book, Functionality
