Implementing task-based language teaching materials in teaching Turkish as a foreign language

This study aims at applying Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching to the development of materials to teach foreigners Turkish noun clauses, which are formed with ?mA, -DIK and ?AcAK suffixes.Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching model, on which this study is based, mainly employs `tasks? as a way of instruction. The tasks designed to teach Turkish noun clauses in this study are mainly of `focused tasks?, which help learners `focus? attention on form while getting involved in communicative practice at the same time. In order to enable learners to notice, understand and produce the targeted structures structure-based production tasks, input enrichment, dictogloss and consciousness-raising tasks are designed. Departing from the theories of implicit learning and explicit learning both of which are suggested to have a role in learners? processing the linguistic feature, the `focus? on the targeted structure is provided first, by means of implicit techniques and then, in the last task, by means of explicit techniques.In order to provide authentic input for learners, texts of different genres were searched for Turkish noun clauses formed with ?mA, -DIK and ?AcAK suffixes, and it was found out that such structures frequently appear in newspapers, magazines and newsletters. A collection of newspaper and magazine articles were further searched for detecting the noun clause type and main clause verb collocations. On the basis of these collocations, the texts employed in materials are prepared.The study merely focuses on developing materials to teach certain Turkish noun clause structures to foreigners. However, the tasks designed and the materials developed are to be evaluated and assessed in real teaching situations, which, in this study, are left to be realised in a further study.