Examining the words with which foreign students learning Turkish have difficulty in pronouncing

One of the main purposes of foreign language teaching is to improve students' communication skills. In order to help students gain these skills, it is necessary to develop the four basic skills of listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Among these skills, speaking is the one that students have the most difficulty with. At this point, great importance should be given to teaching pronunciation, which is one of the components of the speaking skill. Based on this information, the aim of the research is to examine the pronunciation mistakes made by foreign students learning Turkish in their reading texts. The study utilized a qualitative research method. The participants in the research are 17 Arab, Russian, Indonesian, and Persian students studying at the A1 level. An interview form, prepared according to the research purpose, was administered to the participants. The interview questions were determined considering the students' level and were translated into their respective languages and presented to the students. Reading texts from the book "Yeni İstanbul A1" were used to collect the data. Furthermore, when selecting the participants, care was taken to include individuals from different nationalities, and preference was given to students whose in-class pronunciation situations were similar. Within the scope of the study, 17 texts from the "New Istanbul A1" book were selected, read aloud, and audio recorded. These audio recordings were then transcribed, and document analysis was conducted. The analysis revealed that Arabic students had difficulties with letters such as /ı/, /ö/, /ü/; Persian students struggled with letters like /ı/, /i/; Russian students faced challenges with letters like /ü/, /ö/, /o/; and Indonesian students encountered issues with letters like /z/, /s/. It was also found that all participants had pronunciation problems with the letter /ş/. As a result of the research, it is believed that the participants struggle with pronouncing these letters due to the typological differences between Turkish and their native languages. Therefore, it is recommended that instructors incorporate special activities focusing on these sounds