THE DIFFICULTIES FACED BY THE FOREIGN STUDENTS LEARNING TURKISH LANGUAGE ABOUT THE CHARACTERISTICS OF TURKISH GRAMMAR AND SPELLING IN WRITTEN EXPRESSION

Language is the primary way of communication. Language, with its oral and written forms, maintains the liveliness from generation to generation and brings the past and future together. Language is one of the important elements of culture. Turkish has an important place among the world languages, because it is universal. This study was realized on the foreign students who have studied Turkish language in Turkey. In scope of Mevlana University TÖMER (Turkish Teaching Center) 2012?2013 academic year, 51 students from three different continents and from 13 countries were exposed to a scale. This scale was prepared in triple scale system (very difficult/a little difficult/not difficult) for students to indicate how it was difficult for them to learn Turkish grammar and spelling. Students were also asked to write a sample sentence about their responses. With this study, foreign students studying Turkish language in Turkey expressed their problems about the characteristics of Turkish written expressions at the end of the two semesters in TÖMER. Investigation was also done according to the country, age, graduation status; students indicated that they had difficulties in homophony, gerunds, prepositions, idioms, personal pronouns, possessive suffixes, epenthesis, conjunctions and copula; they also indicated that they had less difficulty in basic meaning, concrete meaning, nouns, verbs, capital letters, plural suffix, question suffix, negative suffix and elements of the sentence. By analyzing the students’ samples, it was seen that some students gave proper samples; some students gave unrelated samples.