The complaint strategies used by the learners learning Turkish as a foreign language

In today's world, the importance attached to both learning and teaching Turkish as a foreign language increasing day by day. As similar to the other languages taught as foreign languages, the transition from practices focusing on only grammatical competence to a holistic view which aims communicative competence is of vital importance. Accordingly, to teach speech acts to the learners of Turkish as a foreign language (YADOT) and to make them to be used in accordance with daily life is also another prominent issue. The purpose of that qualitative study is to determine how successful the learners of Turkish as a foreign language are at the use of the complaint act in different contexts and to which complaint strategies they apply. In accordance with the design of the research, the case method has been used. 18 learners of Turkish as a foreign language being at the level of B1, B2 and C1 in Istanbul University Language Center have been selected through convenience sampling. The data has been collected by applying discourse completion test. To analyze the data, the specified eleven complaint strategies have been based. As a result, it has been seen that the learners of Turkish as a foreign language do not have difficulties in understanding the message being aimed, however, they are not successful enough to choose the contextualized address forms and the appropriate vocabulary items to initiate a dialogue.