The effect of reading texts used in teaching Turkish to foreigners on voiceness acquisition of Turkish (Bosnia Herzegovina case)

In this study, it was aimed to determine the effect of the reading texts used in teaching Turkish to foreigners on the acquisition of Turkish pronunciation, after determining the phonemes that Bosnian-Herzegovina students who learn Turkish at the basic level made pronunciation mistakes during aloud reading activities. The phonemes in the reading texts spoken by Bosnian students were analyzed with the Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2020) program, taking into account their position in association with consonants with different qualities in the phonological environment, they were shaped with IPA values in R language, and the Turkish vowel productions of the participants were examined within the framework of the R programming language. The sample group of the study consisted of 40 Bosnian students, 25 female and 15 male, between the ages of 15-20, learning Turkish at the basic language proficiency level. In the selection of the participants, the criteria were sought for the mother tongue of each of the students to be Bosnian and each of them to be students who had previously encountered English as their first foreign language. In the research, mixed research model was used in order to determine the effects of reading texts on the Turkish pronunciation skills of foreign students. Accordingly, the quantitative outputs of the data obtained with the Praat (Boersma ve Weenink, 2020) sound analysis program were structured and interpreted in accordance with the descriptive analysis model. The results of the research showed that the basic level Bosnian students could not pronounce the Turkish phonemes /ı/, /ö/, /ü/ correctly, which are not found in the Bosnian alphabet; especially he articulated the vowels around the voiced sound farther back than they should; sentence and word shows that their emphases are realized differently from Turkish speakers. Accordingly, it has been concluded that reading texts in which Turkish-specific phonemes such as /ı/, /ö/, /ü/ are exemplified gradually for students at A1 level and frequently with different words and sentences from A2 level will be beneficial for gaining Turkish pronunciation acquisition.