Yabancı Dil Olarak Türkçe Öğrenenlerin Bilinmeyen Kelimeleri Anlamlandırma Sürecinde Başvurdukları Stratejiler
Strategies Used by Learners of Turkish as a Foreign Language to Infer the Meaning of Unknown Words

Summary/Abstract: In order for students to understand the texts they read and listen to, they need to have knowledge of the words in the text. It is difficult for foreign language learners to know the meaning of every word. For this reason, students need to develop some strategies. Having an idea about unknown words and guessing unknown words from the text are the most frequently used and useful contextual inference strategies. Insufficient knowledge of word meanings is considered one of the main problems for students in the process of reading and understanding texts. Students may tend to develop negative attitudes toward reading when they encounter a large number of unknown words in a text. Therefore, the aim of this study is to help students develop positive feelings about reading through contextual prediction strategies for unknown words. The aim of this study is to determine the inference strategies used by learners of Turkish as a foreign language when they encounter words with unknown meanings. In line with this purpose, the research questions are expressed as follows: What are the strategies used by learners of Turkish as a foreign language in making sense of unknown words? Does the use of these strategies differ according to age, gender, and language level? The research was designed as a descriptive survey model. The descriptive survey model is an approach that aims to describe a past or still existing situation as it is. In this type of research, the events and situations are investigated in detail and these studies are generally known as survey research (Erkuş, 2005). Karasar (2006) defines general survey models as the survey arrangements carried out on the whole population or a group of samples taken from the population in order to reach a general judgment about the population in a universe consisting of a large number of elements. A 14-item 4-point Likert-type questionnaire developed by Qian (2004) and adapted into Turkish by Ülper and Çetinkaya (2020) was used to determine the strategies used by learners of Turkish as a foreign language when they encounter unknown words. The first 8 items of the questionnaire aim to determine the strategies used by learners of Turkish as a foreign language regarding what they do when they encounter an unknown word. The other 6 items aim to determine the strategies they use when guessing the meaning of an unknown word. According to the results of the study, in general, when foreign students encounter a word whose meaning they do not know in a text, they frequently use the strategies of “I look up the meaning of the word from a dictionary of Turkish-mother tongue type” and “I try to infer the meaning of the word from the context.” However, they rarely use the strategies “I look up the meaning of the word from a Turkish-Turkish type dictionary” and “I ignore the word.” According to Ülper and Çetinkaya (2020), when students who learn Turkish as a foreign language at the C1 level encounter an unknown word, they mostly use the strategies “I look for clues within myself for the meaning of the word,” “I write down the word,” and “I ask the teacher for help,” respectively. Similarly, Ülper and Çetinkaya (2020) found in their study that C1-level students who learn Turkish as a foreign language prefer to use dictionaries (Turkish-Turkish / Turkish-native) at the same rate when they encounter an unknown word. However, in this study, it was determined that students preferred a Turkish-language dictionary more than a Turkish-Turkish dictionary. In addition, it was determined that female students preferred a dictionary of Turkish-native language type more than male students. When we look at the difference between the inference strategies used by learners of Turkish as a foreign language when they encounter a word whose meaning they do not know according to their language levels, it can be said that students at the C1 level use the strategy “I ignore the word” less than students at the B2 level. This result shows that as the level progresses, students prefer reaching meaning in different ways rather than ignoring the word more. It can also be said that students at the C1 level use the strategy of “looking for clues within the word itself for its meaning” more than students at the B2 level. Similarly, when the difference between the inference strategies used by learners of Turkish as a foreign language when guessing a word whose meaning they do not know is analyzed according to language levels, it was found that students at the B2 level used the strategies “I examine the unknown word to see if it contains any grammatical clue” and “I examine whether I know the meaning of any part of the word (root, stem)” more than students at the C1 level.

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