The employment of theater as a literary genre in teaching Turkish as a foreign language and its contribution to language skills

Teaching Turkish as a foreign language is a field which is needed day by day and in which studies on teaching Turkish to the foreigners correctly are carried out. To achieve this, communicative activities are projected by applying latest approaches in order to enable the learners of Turkish to understand the language correctly and to express themselves fluently. How much the projected activities improve the language and social skills of the students and whether the learning is permanent are topics of discussion. Recently, communicative and culture based approaches have been employed in order to provide with permanence in language learning and communicate in that language, following CEFR criteria on language skills. Authentic materials are required to employ those approaches. The aim of this study is to make suggestions about how the students can improve their language skills permanently by making use of the fact that the theatrical texts, which are authentic and literary, present Turkish in a communicative and cultural context. In this regard, the materials used in language teaching, approaches and methods, the strategies to improve language skills have been examined. Furthermore, language, culture and theatre relation has a vital significance in this study because of the interrelatedness of language and culture as well as the contribution of the universal and social cultural elements in the theatrical texts to language teaching. Finally, the contribution of the authentic and literary aspect of the theater to language improvement has been studied in detail. The method of this study is literature review and content analysis. Rumuz Goncagül by Oktay Arayıcı is examined as an example of that the theatrical texts present Turkish in a communicative and cultural context and contribute to the improvement of language skills. Keywords: Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language, Theater, Culture, Language Skills, CEFR.