Anecdotes in the Scope of Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language: Nasreddin Hodja Anecdotes

Abstract

The language teaching is a concept identified with the teaching of culture. Because the language transmits and reflects the culture. The best items that reflect the culture are tales, legends and anecdotes generated by the people of that culture. To make use of these kinds of items in language teaching may easily increase the cultural awareness of the target language. Considering the characteristics of anecdotes, it may be thought that the anecdotes are different than the other type of folk narratives. The purpose of this study, from the Nasreddin Hodja anecdotes in the texts of the book "Turkish Reading Book and Vocabulary and Grammar" written by W. Burckhardt Barker to teach the Turkish language to the Brits, is to determine the function of anecdotes, but particularly the function of Nasreddin Hodja's anecdotes in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. In order to achieve this goal, seventy two Nasreddin Hodja anecdotes from the W. B. Barker's book have been analyzed; fourteen of them have, been simplified and The Document Analysis Technique has been applied to those anecdotes. At the end of the analysis, it has been seen that the Nasreddin Hodja anecdotes are short, contain plenty of humor; the idioms and proverbs have been narrated in their own context, the words, group of words or sentence repetitions are frequent, and all these have been presented with the cultural items. These features of anecdotes make it easy to teach the vocabulary which is important in language teaching. Since the anectodes contain the basic vocabulary of a language (organs, number systems, etc.), reflect the everyday life, are always up-to-date and improve the basic linguistic skills, they are quite useful for those learning a foreign language. Considering particularly the implicit meanings in Nasreddin Hodja's anecdotes, these texts can be regarded as useful texts in teaching Turkish language to learners at B2-C1 level.