Teaching adverbial clauses in Turkish as a foreign language

Many foreigners have been visiting Turkey either to receive a BA degree or a job, or to lead their lives in this country. Turkish is taught as a foreign language in our country in order to meet the needs of these people in terms of communication. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of students coming to Turkey to earn university education. This increase has led to foundation of Turkish Language Education Centers at various universities. In these fast growing institutions, there are lots of problems concerning the teacher training programme, the material development, the assessment and evaluation, and the evaluation of four basic language skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. Teaching grammar, which forms the basis of these skills is regarded as one of the most important problems. It is observed that in Turkish language teaching sets designed for foreigners, grammar is taught with mostly traditional methods; Turkish is taught as if the target learner group is the native speakers; some grammatical structures are not presented with an appropriate learning level while some are not taught at all. In this dissertation, adverbial clauses, which are not only one of the most important grammatical structures in Turkish, but also difficult to teach as a grammar structure to both native speakers as well as foreign students were presented and discussed. Based on the double articulation of the language, the semantic analysis of the adverbial clauses in Turkish was conducted and the sème of these semantic units were determined. Also, a couple of suggestions were presented related to the teaching of a few monèmes building adverbial clauses.