Which Cultural Aspects do The Textbooks of Teaching Turkish to Foreigners Transfer?

Abstract

Teaching a foreign language aims at not only teaching the language and language skills, but transferring the culture of the target language. The main reason for that is people learn the target language as a standby in addition to learning the language. It is important that the more individuals learn the cultural features of the country the more they understand the language better. It is an undeniable fact that language and culture are inseparable parts, so culture should be learned simultaneously while learning that language. Because of that relationship between language and culture, language teaching also means teaching culture. Foreign language textbooks reflect the characteristics of the language-speaking community and make it a cultural product of that language. This study is to identify the place and importance of the textbooks used in teaching Turkish to foreigners in the target language teaching and to research which cultural items these books convey. Thus,  A1-A2 level textbooks of the Turkish teaching set for Gazi Foreigners were selected as a sample and done document analysis to identify what these sources include in terms of "daily life, interpersonal relations, values and education, literature-arts and music, traditions and folklore, social life, geography and space, foreign (universal) cultural elements". It was observed that the elements of Turkish culture concentrated on the relation between daily life and interpersonal relations, and there was no balanced distribution among other cultural elements. Therefore, these books need to be reviewed so that they can raise cultural awareness of the students.