Problems of teaching Tuvan as foreign language to Turkish students

Abstract

Tuvan and Turkish are cognate languages. Although they haven’t been in direct contact for thousands of years, they have preserved common features on all levels of linguistic structure. At the same time, a number of dissimilarities have accumulated over time, which makes it difficult and time-consuming for Turkish students to learn it. At the moment, a number of Turkish universities have departments of modern Turkic languages and literatures which offer courses and programs in various languages, including Tuvan.

In this article, its author, who teaches Tuvan at the University of Pamukkale, shares her experience and examines the problems of teaching the language. Students begin studying Tuvan as a major in their second year, having mastered the general comparative grammar of Altai, Khakas, Tuvan and Yakut languages, as well as the language of Orkhon-Yenisei runic inscriptions. This helps students successfully master Tuvan grammar. The mistakes students make are due to phonetic peculiarities, morphology of Tuvan and other factors which are yet to be systematized and analyzed. Another problem is the lack of old Tuvan-Turkish and Turkish-Tuvan dictionaries. New dictionaries must also be made.

In her teaching practice, the author has developed and used a number of “templates” on certain topics, such as getting acquainted, talking about family, engaging in a dialogue, etc. She also edited the Tuvan section of the book titled “Çağdaş Türk Lehçeleri Metin Aktarmaları” (“Translations from Contemporary Turkic Languages”, 2016). In this collection, intended as a didactic textbook, texts appear first in the original, then transcribed into Latin script, and finally, in Turkish translation.