Bilingualism in Turkey and Turkish Language Education

Figure 4 The response of “D” person acquired Turkish as a second language to the question ““ Where and How did you learn Turkish ?”

NOTE:I have learnt Turkish at nursery school.

HATUN DEMİR5/E

Figure 5 The response of “E” person acquired Turkish as a second language to the question ““ Where and How did you learn Turkish ?”

When these responses have been classified, the following results have been attained:

“Where and how have you learnt Turkish?”		Those speaking both Turkish and Arabic	Those speaking both Turkish and Kurdish
Evde At home	From tv	-	11
	From my sister or brother	14	24
	From my parents	76	40
At the outside	From my friends	10	8
At school	From my teachers	-	17
Total		100	100

Table 1: The rates of individual’s learning Turkish

Which language do you speak at home or outside?		Those speaking both Turkish and Arabic	Those speaking both Turkish and Kurdish
At home	Turkish	72	19
At home	Other (Arabic/Kurdish)	28	81
Total		100	100
At outside	Turkish	84	41
At outside	Other (Arabic/Kurdish)	16	59
Total		100	100

Table 2: The communicative language at home and outside.

Which language have you learnt previously?	Those speaking both Turkish and Arabic	Those speaking both Turkish and Kurdish
Turkish	56	19
Other (Arabic/Kurdish)	44	81
I can understand but cannot speak the languages except Turkish	17	4
Total	100	100

Table 3: The previously learnt language

1. 
   Turkish knowledge of the bilinguals in Turkey: In the studies conducted until today; it has been observed that the bilinguals are more successful than monolinguals in the issues such as the executive Function (Yoshida 2008), multi-tasking (Poarch and Bialystok 2015; Hsieh 2015), detection of multiple structures when they include input variability (Poepsel and Weiss 2016), task switching (Wiseheart, Viswanathan and Bialystok 2016), learning the phonological structures in a new language (Kuo and Anderson 2012), visual attention and finding what is different (Friesen, Latman et.al. 2015) etc. In addition; it has been detected that the bilinguals are better than monolinguals in terms of critical thinking skills (Merrikhi 2011) and the highness of attention control in the mother tongue of the person (Duncan, Segalowitz and Phillips 2016). In this study; it has been examined whether the bilinguals have any difference from the monolinguals in terms of the number of vocabulary items they use while telling about themselves, those they love and what they think of. The data attained from the text writing activities lasting for three weeks and realized in an activity for each week are as follows:
   

The vocabulary knowledge of students (in terms of quantity and mode value)³