Abstract
Yabancı Dil Olarak Türkçe (TFL) Öğrenen Suriyeli Öğrencilerin Deneyimleri Üzerine Nitel Bir Çalışma: Tutumlar, Algılar ve Dil Öğrenimini Etkileyen Faktörler
The civil war that broke out in Syria in 2011 continues to affect Turkey materially and morally. Due to this war, millions of immigrants from Syria have immigrated to our country in recent years. As a result of migration events, a necessity has emerged for people with different cultures and social lifestyles to live together, which has also brought some intricate problems with itself. It is a known fact that education, which is one of the most significant problems that has arisen in this long process, requires a great deal of planning and thinking. The most important problem experienced in this education and training process is that a significant majority of the Syrians do not have sufficient command of the Turkish language. For this reason, teaching Turkish has become a mandatory priority in terms of the education and social integration of Syrian immigrant students. To this end, the Ministry of National Education, different state and foundation universities as well as non-governmental organizations have opened various language courses on weekdays or weekends for teaching Turkish language. In line with this, in this study, it is aimed to reveal the attitudes of Syrian students towards learning and speaking Turkish, the factors affecting the Turkish language learning process, that is the problems experienced in this sense, and the students’ frequency of using Turkish language in daily life. In this qualitative study, a semi-structured interview form was employed and the study was conducted with 20 Syrian students studying and learning Turkish at a public school affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in the 2022-2023 academic year. Content analysis was used to analyze the data collected. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that the majority of the participants had positive attitudes towards learning Turkish as a foreign language. Additionally, it was concluded that the Syrian students, who face diverse linguistic problems such as Turkish sentence structure being different from Arabic language, insufficient L2 feedback from teachers to students, communication anxiety, and lack of self-confidence, consider it as a need to use Turkish in many areas of social life and thus want to improve their Turkish speaking skills efficiently.
Keywords
Syrian immigrant students, Turkish as a foreign language, Factors affecting learning