The impact of mother tongue syntax typology on teaching Turkish as a foreign language

This study aims to reveal the effects of the syntactic structures of the native language of the B level students who learn Turkish as a foreign language when they create sentences or phrases. To examine this effect or to follow it for the instructors requires knowledge of many languages, and it is hardly possible to know all the mother tongues in any foreign language teaching class. Therefore, language typology and syntactic correlations will both provide a better understanding of this process and will facilitate understanding of other syntactic sequences related to them only by knowing the basic word order of languages. The typological findings show that the orders of the concepts such as subject, object and verb, which indicate grammatical relations, provide important assumptions about the arrangement of language in other structures. This study, which correlates linguistic correlations with foreign language teaching, examined the errors related to syntax, which are thought to originate from the mother tongue of the students under main headings: word order, sentence agreement, voice and subordinate clauses. 150 Turkish texts from the three most common word order in the world and thus in the students studied (50 SOV, 50 SVO and 50 VSO) are analyzed. The syntactic errors of the students were interpreted by establishing relations with their native languages in the light of typological correlations. In the findings, it was found out that the students who come from the languages whose basic constituent order is different from Turkish made much more syntactical errors, and these errors were observed to be overlapping with the mother tongue syntactic structures. The aim of this work is both to improve the quality of teaching Turkish as a foreign language and to strengthen the student teaching relationship by providing the language typology awareness to the people who learn and teach Turkish as a foreign language. It also reveals the necessity of awareness of language typology and language transfer for the ones who prepare language material. Key words Syntax, language typology, language transfer