Abstract
METAFORIC PERSPECTIVES ON "TURKISH CULTURE" FOR FOREIGN STUDENTS LEARNING TURKISH LANGUAGE
The place of culture transfer in language teaching is too big to be denied. It is necessary to learn the cultures in order to understand and understand the society to which it belongs. Cultural transfer is also of great importance in teaching Turkish to foreigners. The purpose of this research is to bring up how the foreign students learning Turkish language conceptualized their thoughts about Turkish culture by metaphors. The objective work team of the research is formed of the total of 57 foreign students learning Turkish language in level B1 in TÖMER (Turkish language teaching center) in Gaziantep University. Every participant completed the sentence “Turkish culture is like ….. , because…..” and the acquired raw data from the answers is analyzed by quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques. According to the findings of the research, the participants produced total of 38 current metaphors about “Turkish culture” concept. Those metaphors are studied by the researchers according to the common features among the metaphors, and collected in two different conceptual categories. The two different conceptual categories showed a lot of differences according to nationality, age, and the gender of the participants. Also the conceptual categories showed a lot of differences according to participants’ education level (high school, bachelor’s degree, postgraduate)
Keywords
Culture, Turkish culture, metaphor, foreign students, TÖMER.
