Difficulties faced in developing speaking skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language

There are four skills in foreign language learning; reading, writing, listening and speaking. Speaking comes to the fore among those four skills in terms of the level of importance. The reason is that the main purpose to learn a language is to communicate, and the first step to communicate is generally to speak. Developing speaking skills even at the beginning level is crucial in order to help the learner make basic transactions, build and maintain social relationships. Despite the fact that developing speaking skills have a tremendous importance in foreign language teaching, it is noticed that the number of the studies in this area concerning this subject is quite few. This fact also shows the importance of conducting this study. Identifying the difficulties faced in developing speaking skills is one of the important reseach areas. Thus, in this study, in order to identify some of the most important difficulties in developing speaking skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language, a questionnaire was conducted and some of the main difficulties were identified based on the perceptions of students studying at TOMER institutions. The findings of the research showed that students had difficulty in areas especially related to linguistic competence as part of communicative competence. It also showed that students had difficulty in speaking about abstract topics the most.