An investigation into the online learning environments where Turkish is taught as a foreign language within the community of inquiry

This study examines online learning environments where Turkish is taught as a foreign language within the community of inquiry. The community of inquiry deals with online learning environments in terms of social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. It is possible to find the three dimensions mentioned in any learning environment and they are the basic dimensions of the foreign language learning process, as it comprises a social stage in which mutual interactions take place, a cognitive stage in which students engage in various mental actions, and a teaching stage in which learning activities take place. For effective language learning, it is important to realize all these stages successfully to provide a social learning environment where the students cognitively internalize the teaching process. Today, every stage of education actively uses internet-based learning environments. Therefore, people should no longer see online learning environments as virtual and artificial learning environments, but as a real and natural learning environment where many activities related to the stages mentioned above are carried out. Both the constantly developing nature of learning and the age of technology we live in require this. This dissertation aims to examine the nature of online environments where Turkish is taught as a foreign language within of community of inquiry to manifest this necessity to some extent. For this purpose, the study reviews the online video lessons of the A1 level students learning Turkish at Tokat Gaziosmanpasa University Turkish Teaching Application and Research Center in terms of the categories that make up the community of inquiry and the indicators that make up these categories. This review is the detailed observation of the video recordings. In those recordings, each discourse or action that stands for the social, cognitive, or instructional presence is coded as various indicators. Following this, the study describes which dimension is realized with which aspects and how much. In addition, the students within the study fill an instrument to display how they perceive their online environments within the community of inquiry. The study makes use of these data to evaluate observation findings. For all these processes, the study fulfills the requirements of the case study, one of the qualitative research designs. The study uses the MAXQDA qualitative data analysis program for the analysis of the observational data. It also utilizes Jamovi, a quantitative data analysis program, for the analysis of quantitative data and statistically describes the results. The findings of the study show that the teaching presence is dominant in the online learning environment of the participant group, who learn Turkish as a foreign language, and the social and cognitive presences are not fully realized.