The use of cultural elements in teaching Turkish vocabulary as a foreign language (Russian-Turkish case)

This research focuses on the deficiency of cultural competency formation in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The research suggests how to overcome this deficiency by developing an exercise system for teaching words reflecting cultural elements and emphasizes that language teaching can not be separated from teaching its culture. The sample of the study consists of 60 students who learned Turkish as a second foreign language at Minsk State Linguistics University in the 2018-2019 academic year. Some student books used for teaching Turkish abroad were anylized and nonequivalent words were extracted and devided into thematic groups. The groups are as follows: family, Daily life, religion, food, house, idioms, music,art,animals,human,exclamations etc. With the acceptance that both food culture and idioms are an integral part of a culture, the subject of 'food' for A1-A2 level and 'idioms' for B1-B2 level have been selected and appropriate exercises have been developed. Before the experimental tarining,students were asken to fill in related questionnaires and interview forms. During three months, both groups were trained four hours a week using exercises. During the educational period, the development of the students and difficulties faced by the participants were observed closely. Qualitative data collection methods such as document analysis, observation, interview and questionnaire were used in the study. The results obtained were analyzed by descriptive analysis method. According to the test results, the students had a superficial knowledge about Turkish dishes and idioms, they did not know their cultural meaning and importance, although some of the participants knew some traditional dishes and very basic idioms. It has been observed that only the names of the dishes and the idioms mentioned in the books do not contribute to the learning of the students and that the students cannot use these words in a practical way; At the end of three-month training, progress was observed in both groups.