Abstract
A REVIEW OF POSTGRADUATE THESES WRITTEN BY FOREIGN STUDENTS IN THE FIELD OF TURKISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION
Since teaching Turkish as a foreign language has recently spread around the world, the number of foreigners working in this field has also increased. A great number of foreign teachers teaching Turkish both in Turkey and abroad are doing their postgraduate research in the field of Turkish language teaching at Turkish universities. The aim of this paper is to examine the postgraduate theses written in the field of Turkish language teaching by foreign students studying in Turkey in terms of various variables, and thus to provide those who work in this field with new ideas and different perspectives. For this purpose, 59 postgraduate theses prepared between the years 1990-2018 in the field of Turkish language teaching by foreign students studying in Turkey were examined. In this study using the descriptive survey model, it was observed that the majority of theses prepared by foreign students in the field of Turkish language teaching were written in 2016 and that 58 of them are Master’s theses and only one of them is a PhD thesis. the results of the research revealed that a large number of foreign students doing their postgraduate research in the field of Turkish language education studied at Dokuz Eylül University, Gazi University and Istanbul University, and that most of the postgraduate students came from Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq and Egypt. It was found out that the majority of foreign students focused on comparing Turkish with their native languages in terms of grammar, word types, discourse characteristics and semantics. Besides, the results showed that foreign students doing their postgraduate research in the field of Turkish language teaching mostly used the quantitative method and the least used method was the mixed one. Last but not the least, 25 out of 59 theses do not directly refer to any kind of research method in them.
Keywords
Turkish language teaching, foreign students, postgraduate theses.