Teacher and student views on in-class activities used in teaching Turkish to foreign students

Classroom activities are designed and implemented in classrooms to develop students' language skills in the process of foreign language education. Especially in recent years, it has been observed that teachers have given importance to various classroom activities in teaching Turkish as a foreign language, but there is no clear data on the extent to which teachers take the preferences of students into consideration when choosing or designing activities. Also, there is no sufficient study on whether there are similarities or differences between teachers and students' preferences regarding the implementation of classroom activities. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the preferences of students and teachers regarding the use of classroom activities in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. In this study, a questionnaire was applied to the teachers and students to determine their preferences about the activities used in the classroom. The content of this questionnaire consisted of 54 questions prepared with the 6-point Likert scale and open-ended questions. At the end of the questionnaire, the responses of the participants were analyzed in SPSS program and according to the data obtained, comparisons were made about preferences for each activity and the similarities and differences between the views of the students and teachers were revealed. According to the results, significant differences were found in 17 of 54 classroom activities. Despite this mismatch, there is a general match between the activities that the students prefer to do and what the teachers do in the classroom. Keywords: language teaching, teaching Turkish to foreigners, teaching Turkish as a foreign language, in-class activities, teacher and student views