Prospectus

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Turkish: Beginners 1

Course
2015-2016

Admission requirements

This course is only available for students in the BA International Studies.

Description

Beginning Turkish I is designed for students who are interested in learning Turkish as a foreign or second language and have little or no previous knowledge of Turkish grammar and vocabulary. Through a communicative approach with all four skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening) integrated, it emphasizes basic oral communication skills and micro-sociolinguistic rules of conversation in Turkish without underestimating the role of grammar. Turkish has an agglutinating structure, which means that students will learn to attach multiple affixes to a stem to form individual words. Reading activities are solely based on authentic texts to provide early access to naturally-occurring language tailored for students’ needs and interests. Speaking and listening activities underline real communicative events with information gap.

Course objectives

Grammar: Turkish does not use an overt copular verb (e.g. to be), but it does indeed have copular sentences. Students will develop an understanding of this structure in the present and past tenses.
Vocabulary and use: Students will learn a wide range of basic vocabulary items, such as numbers, occupations, countries and nationalities, verbs denoting everyday activities, kinship terms, various adverbs of time and manner, food names and classifiers, various adjectives needed to describe people and places. Students will also learn some basic situationally-bound utterances, such as the ones we need when we introduce ourselves, ask about people, places and things and describe events.
Spoken interaction: We will emphasize spoken interaction since language is primarily for interacting with people. By the end of the course, students will be able to introduce themselves, ask and talk about personal information, describe people, places and things, talk about daily activities and hobbies, ask and talk about past events, give directions, talk about wishes and desires, describe events and compare and contrast people, places and things.
Listening: Students will learn to recognize Turkish lexical and sentential stress, understand commonly used words and expressions when speakers speak carefully, recognize Turkish vowels and follow simple directives and understand the relationship between words in simple, commonly used sentence structures.
Speaking: By the end of the second block, students will have learned to form simple sentences, wh- questions and yes/no questions with appropriate intonation and stress.
Reading: Students will read short texts to look for information, understand the main idea, recognize the order of events, understand the relationship between words in a sentence, understand descriptions of people, places, things and events. Some short texts include but are not limited to signs, forms, timetables, descriptions, short biographies and autobiographies, menus, recipes and newspaper articles. We will be using a number of extra authentic materials to supplement our textbook.
Writing: By the end of the second block, students will have learned to fill out forms with personal information, write post-cards or other short texts where they introduce themselves, their families and friends, make daily schedules and shopping lists, give a recipe, and short descriptions of events.

Timetable

The timetable is available on the BA International Studies website

Mode of instruction

Three two hour tutorials every week

Attending lectures and tutorials is compulsory. If you are not able to attend a lecture or a tutorial, please inform the tutor of the course. Being absent without notification can result in a lower grade or exclusion from the final exam or essay.

Course Load

  • Total course load: 280 hours (10 EC)

  • Attending classes: 72 hours (6 hrs per week over 12 weeks)

  • Preparing classes, exams and extra activities : 198 hours

Assessment method

To be allowed to sit for the final exam for Beginning Turkish I students must satisfy the following skills requirements throughout the courses:
Quizzes: 30%
Creative project: 20%
Homework assignments:50%
Students who achieve at least 60% of the above skills requirements may register for the final exam, which counts for 100% of the course grade.
Quizzes: At the end of each module, you will be given a written quiz. Each quiz will take about 30 minutes and cover topics of grammar, vocabulary and communicative interaction from the relevant module.
Homework assignments: You will be given a number of homework assignments during the semester. These will be based on both previous material for review and on future material to prepare for the next module.
Creative project and presentation: You will be asked to do a mini project on a topic of your own choice for each block. You will be asked to submit this to me in written format and also present it in class orally. More on this project is to be announced on a separate handout.
Final exam: There will be a final exam at the end of each block. These exams will be in two parts, a written part which includes grammar, vocabulary, use, reading and listening, and an oral part which includes speaking and spoken interaction.

The resit will be a written exam of two hours, and will test if the students have reached the end level of this semester. This exam consists of the following components:

  • Reading and writing;

  • Written dialogue;

  • Vocabulary and grammar.
    To complete the final mark, please take notice of the following:
    the final mark for the course is established by determining the weighted average

Blackboard

Blackboard will be used. For tutorial groups: please enroll in blackboard after your enrolment in uSis

Students are requested to register on Blackboard for this course.

Reading list

The main textbook is Yeni Hitit Yabancılar için Türkçe Ders Kitabı 1 (TÖMER Ankara Üniversitesi Yayınları) for both blocks. We will also be using a number of extra materials to supplement this book. The extra materials include grammar and vocabulary exercises, reading activities based on authentic texts, writing activities, listening activities, guidelines for spoken interaction in the classrooom. You will be given hard-copies of these materials. Soft-copies will also be uploaded to Blackboard, under “course documents.”

Registration

Enrolment through uSis is mandatory.

General information about uSis is available in English and Dutch

Registration Studeren à la carte and Contractonderwijs

Not applicable.

Contact

mr. M.E. Yildirim, email M.E.Yildirim@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Remarks

None