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Tobie1977 · Joined: 09 Aug 2011 Posts: 6

What techniques do you employ to help Turkish (adult) students?

How do you get them to understand when to use 'the' for example?

Also, what other mistakes have you noticed Turkish students make? And what do you do to help them with those mistakes?

spiral78 · Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 11534 Location: On a Short Leash

For 'the,' you can always do tasks based on specific/general issues. And tasks based on the many exceptions to the rule Shocked

However, for this one in particular, do keep in mind that correct article use is regarded as a high-level (not beginner or even intermediate level) error in second language speakers of English. The misuse of articles very rarely affects meaning, and while practice in getting them correct certainly shouldn't be ignored, expecting intermediate and lower students to perfect this aspect is probably unreasonable. Likely most of your energy could better be spent elsewhere.

Sashadroogie · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 12:01 pm Post subject:

We. Like some other languages, it means something slightly different in Turkish. I forget the technical name for it - the inclusive 'we', I think. E.g. "We went on honeymoon to Paris with my wife." Not the menage-a-trois you may think: just that wife is included in the first we in Turkish, but would not be in English.

Sashadroogie · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 12:02 pm Post subject:

"I like spor." Never managed to get them to say sport... : (

Sashadroogie · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 12:04 pm Post subject:

Stress-timing. Notably absent from Turkish, so special attention is needed for this. Word stress, but also sentential stress. Drill drill drill!

Qaaolchoura · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 12:01 am Post subject:

Sashadroogie · Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 5:44 am Post subject:

Could have got my technical terms mixed up, as I said, but Turkish does do something different with we, as does Russian. As in the example cited the second person mentioned is also in the original we - 'We went to Paris with my wife.' Wife = we. This is standard and correct Turkish and Russian, as far as I know, and is not a problem in speaking on the fly. They are simply directly translating from L1.

Hope that helps. I'm a little sleepy this morning...

Dedicated · Joined: 18 May 2007 Posts: 972 Location: UK

These are some of the areas where I found Turkish had problems, and you could focus on :

Turkish is phonetic, so a word's spelling can almost certainly be predicted from its spelling - this makes English difficult.

Turkish is an agglutinative language so prepositions are attached following the noun - so all prepositions are difficult in English for Turks.

Turkish is usually S -O-V pattern, whereas English is S -V-O, so word order can be problematic.

As for pronunciation, Turkish students have problems with t/th; w/v and consonant clusters (3 or more consonants together, eg. strength) and differing intonational patterns.

I hope this helps a bit !

CECTPA · Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2011 3:10 pm Post subject:

Where is come from unnecessary auxiliary? Is drive me crazy and once it takes hold it is really really difficult to stamp out.