A case study on the competency of Turkish language teachers speaking skills (A case of Sakarya)

Distinguishing characteristics of the verbal language make it indispensable for daily lives of people as well as for education and business. The effective use of this skill is particularly crucial for the teachers, especially for Turkish language teachers, who use their voices as a tool of profession. However, a common finding in the studies conducted on pre-service teachers is that speaking skills of teachers are not sufficiently improved during their undergraduate education. On the other hand, there is no study on in-service Turkish language teachers. Therefore, this study aims to reveal the situation concerning the speaking skills competencies of Turkish language teachers. First, the competencies of the participating the teachers with regard to the articulation and pronunciation aspect of the speaking skills were assessed, and then, their self-evaluations about their own speaking skills were obtained. The study was designed as a case study and two types of data collection were employed in the study. The first group of data collected consisted of the speaking data acquired from the verbalization of the designated texts by the Turkish language teachers; whereas, the second group of data contained the semi-structured interview data about the teachers' selfevaluation of their own speaking skills competencies. The participants were 20 Turkish language teachers (2 male and 18 female) working at the schools subordinated to the Provincial National Education Directorate in Sakarya. The participants voluntarily participated in the study and had differing years of teaching experience. The text pronunciation data were assessed by the field experts. In the semi-structured interviews, on the other hand, the views of Turkish language teachers regarding their speaking competencies and their conversations in the classroom were elicited. The data obtained from these interviews were analyzed by two researchers using thematic analysis, which is one of the methods of content analysis. Based on the findings of the text pronunciation data, it was found that the articulation skills levels of the participating Turkish language teachers were open to improvement with 2.1 points in a rating where minimum and maximum scores are 1 and 4 points, respectively. The findings on the self-evaluation of speaking skills revealed that most of the Turkish language teachers did not find their own speaking skills as sufficient and attributed this inadequacy to the poorly designed speaking training lessons in their undergraduate education. They rated their speaking rates as average. Some participants faced problems in controlling their breathing while speaking in the classroom. Many participants had little knowledge on how to protect one's vocal health and suffered from pharyngitis-related problems. Keywords: speaking skills competency, Turkish language teacher, pronunciation, articulation, vocal training.