A STUDY ON TEACHER QUALIFICATIONS IN TEACHING TURKISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

In the context of teaching Turkish to foreigners, ongoing debates in recent years have been focused more on teacher qualifications in teaching Turkish as a foreign language, methods, materials and assessment aspects in our country. Especially, discussions about the absence of undergraduate programs, which are going to educate the experts that will work in the field of teaching Turkish as a foreign language (TTFL), and under which department of which faculties these programs should be opened have left their mark to the last 20 years. Today, it is seen that the lecturers working in the field of TTFL both in and out of the country have been graduated from many different undergraduate programs. This variety in the field brings the adequacy of TTFL teaching and learning outcomes on in terms of quality, and the questions of what kind of road map they, who as lecturers have been graduated from different programs, follow in terms of common and particular targets, content, methods and techniques, materials will be used and assessment in the processes of teaching Turkish as a foreign or second language and what kind of common ground they have agreed on have not been dealt with enough in scientific research studies, yet (Yıldız and Tunçel, 2012). In this study, among the aspects mentioned above, teacher qualifications have been studied. The aim of this study is to define qualifications of lecturers, who are going to teach/are teaching Turkish to foreigners, through student perceptions. In the study, teacher qualifications have been investigated to cover four topics as subject area/subject area knowledge, teaching-learning processes/teaching profession, program and content knowledge and tracing and assessing skills of learning development in TTFL processes. With this study, it has been aimed to contribute in defining the qualifications that lecturers, who are working/going to work in the field of TTFL, are expected to have through foreign students' perceptions. In the study, data, which are collected via interview technique, have been grouped with categorization of thematic and most frequently repeated ideas. Data, which are collected via questionnaires, have been analyzed with SPSS statistics program.