Acquisition of French subjunctive mode by Turkish university students

The present study handles the subject of the linguistic dimension of the challenges in the context of subjunctive mode encountered by Turkish University students in the process of learning French. Both acquisition and transfer of the mode in question are one of the most important problems encountered. This problem is not only related to its conjugation, but also, and perhaps more so, it should be because of its areas of use not fully comprehensible. Because its areas of use don't correspond to the ones students have in their native language, the subjunctive mode poses an important problem. Indeed, we experienced ourselves these difficulties of acquiring French subjunctive mode very closely as being students in the past and educationalist of today. We believe that the main factor underlying this difficulty is the differences between languages. The present study was studied in the frame of applied linguistics. Besides, the French subjunctive mode and event modalities suggested to be its equivalent were examined with contrastive approach. The idea that subjunctive mode as morphological, functional, semantic and syntactic is very different for Turkish university students is put forward and the differences caused difficulties in the acquisition process are investigated. This study was evaluated within the framework of the quantitative research method. A questionnaire technique was used in collecting data; quantitative data were obtained and analyzed. The questionnaire in question consists of 37 factual, attitude and knowledge questions. According to data obtained from this questionnaire, the similarities facilitate the acquisition and the differences make it difficult. It was revealed that the mode of the subjective is one of the most difficult subject while learning French. It was found that the conjugation of the verb and use of this mode make its acquisition more difficult. It was determined that the students are not good at understanding its areas of use and this problem causes an important impediment. It was concluded that the subjunctive mode doesn't carry completely the feature of a foreign element as well as the feature of sameness for Turkish university students. Anahtar Kelimeler: Applied linguistics, contrastive linguistics, language acquisition, language teaching, subjective mode.