An Investigation into Arab Students Translanguaging of Turkish Language

The purpose of this research was to investigate how Arab students acquire Turkish language at the TÖMER center of Istanbul Aydin University. This research tackled difficulties of Turkish-Arabic translanguaging and attitudes of the participants were reported and supported by examples. The study engaged 34 participants with ages ranging between 18- 25. The focus of the research was centered on the fact that a lot of students encounter misspelling and mispronunciation problems because of the similarity between Turkish and Arabic vocabularies and pronunciations. For this reason, we worked on answering the following research questions: 1. To which extent are the students practicing the Turkish- Arabic translanguaging technique 2. What kind of obstacles do the students encounter when they practice translanguaging In order to collect the data, the participants were to fill in a survey comprising several language-relevant questions. The survey question solicited general information about the participants, questioned their speaking difficulties and then probed their aptitude for the encountered obstacles in their trials to communicate in Turkish. The findings indicated that student translanguaging has turned to be a kind of code-mixing. Moreover, it was deduced that translanguaging was facilitated but confused by the similarity between both languages Arabic and Turkish, and thus, many students were resorting to the strategy of recontextualization.