- Reflect on your experiences as a language teacher and learning in this latest speed-dating workshop. What difficulties did you encounter? How did you successfully relay concepts that were foreign to your classmates as your students? If you were eventually granted the opportunity to teach a full semester-long course on the target language, what strategies would you adopt?
As Turkish is an agglutinative language, I considered the use of affixes and suffixes as one of the key concepts of the language. I found it is difficult that as my classmates don’t understand the meaning of Turkish, it is hard for them to find the pattern of how affixes and suffixes can change the meaning of the words. However, as some of the English words also have this kind of formation, I believe them got the idea of how many words were created in Turkish.
If I could teach Turkish, I would help them building up vocabulary by teaching them core vocabularies first. Lots of Turkish words were built by adding affixes and suffixes to the core vocabularies. In this way, I believe the students would be able to learn a large amount of vocabularies in the most effective and efficient way.
Comments
Hi Joyce! I found the same difficulty in trying to find a concept to teach that did not require prior knowledge of the language. Many of the concepts in my target language are easier to understand when you have prior knowledge of roots and and basic vocabulary.