Specific purposes language teaching for student learning Turkish as a foreing laguage: Acedemic Turkish

One of the leading areas in learning Turkish as a foreign language is education. Students who come to Turkey to study in higher education institutions first take general Turkish and then academic Turkish courses. These courses are usually conducted by the Turkish language teaching centers of the higher education institution. While students learn general Turkish between A1-C1 levels at a level that they can communicate in social life, they can learn the academic Turkish they will use in their higher education life at the "academic Turkish" level. This course is compulsory in Turkish language teaching centers only for students with scholarships from the Presidency for Turks Abroad. However, the fact that there are deficiencies in the functioning process of this course, course contents, syllabus, course instructors, course materials, assessment-evaluation, etc., and that different practices are carried out in different institutions make it necessary to teach academic Turkish for special purposes. In this study, it is planned to evaluate the academic Turkish course for international students within the scope of special purpose language teaching by first analyzing the needs and designing the necessary content for this course in this context. The study focuses on two main problems. The first problem is to reveal the need for academic Turkish for international students to successfully continue their university education in Turkey and the level of this need in terms of various variables. The second problem is the lack of a standard program, syllabus and course content for teaching academic Turkish to international students. With this study, it is planned to offer solutions to the problems mentioned above. First of all, a needs analysis was conducted to determine the needs of the students. As a sample, students who are scholarship students of the Presidency for Turks Abroad studying at Akdeniz University were selected. A mixed design will be applied to determine the academic Turkish needs of international students. In the study, quantitative data were obtained through student and instructor questionnaires and qualitative data were obtained through semi-structured student interviews. The quantitative data to be obtained in the study were analyzed with the Statistical Program for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS 20), and the percentages, arithmetic averages and standard deviations of the data obtained from both the student questionnaire and the instructor questionnaire were calculated with this program. Qualitative data were analyzed using both descriptive and content analysis techniques. Based on the data obtained as a result of the analysis, syllabuses in accordance with the 2018 guidelines of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages were created within the framework of Turkish and special purpose language teaching. In the light of the findings, the vocabulary list for academic Turkish lessons in social sciences was determined according to word frequency and sample reading texts were created accordingly. The list of materials frequently used in the lessons was collected from the teachers who are experts in the field in creating word frequency, and academic texts were prepared by determining the word frequencies of these resources, including ten course materials. An experimental group and a control group were formed for the implementation of these academic texts, and the pre-test and post-test revealed that the lessons taught with adapted texts were more effective.