Beginning Turkish - Critical Language Series

Review by: Annalisa Sandrelli, University of Hull

Authors: Prof. András J.E. Bodrogligeti

Distributors: The University of Arizona Press. http://clp.arizona.edu/cls

System requirements: Windows 95 or 98, or Windows NT 3.51 or 4.0, 486 (or better), 16 Mb RAM minimum, 2x CD-ROM, SVGA (or better), sound card, speaker, and 9 Mb disk space. Microphone recommended.

Price: US$69.95

Introduction

The Critical Languages Series includes interactive CD-ROMs for less-commonly taught languages such as Brazilian Portuguese, Cantonese, Chinese, Kazakh, Korean, and Turkish. The courseware is designed for beginners and consists of twenty lessons on two CD-ROMs, roughly corresponding to two semesters of language learning classes. Every lesson consists of a video clip with a dialogue, an audio version and a written transcript of the latter, followed by a number of exercises.

The stated aims of Beginning Turkish are to "…actively encourage your listening, speaking and reading skills by combining INTERACTIVE audio, video and text in a variety of exercises…". The twenty lessons in the package present various aspects of life in Turkey, such as school, introducing oneself, at the police station, telephone numbers, shopping, working, etc. The course also includes a concise section on Turkish Alphabet and Grammar and a section called Cultural Dimensions of Turkish.

Pedagogical content

The package can be used either as self-study material or as part of an educational programme. Although learners are allowed to work at their own pace to suit their learning strategies, the lessons are graded in order of ascending difficulty and suggestions are given on the preferred order in which to carry out the various activities.

Students are encouraged to start by watching the video clip and trying to guess as much content as possible from visual clues. Then, they listen to the audio version of the text while reading the transcript, in Turkish only. The transcript is available in both sentence view and word view: whole sentences or separate words, respectively, are highlighted while the passage is playing. This helps students match sounds and written words. English translations of individual words or whole sentences are available by selecting the "Play translations after native" option.

A number of expressions, structures and words are underlined in the transcript of every dialogue: if learners click on these hot words, they can read the footnotes associated to them. The footnotes contain explanations or references to relevant parts of the Grammar section.

After studying the footnotes, learners move on to the exercises. There are five exercises in every lesson: Pronunciation, Dictation, Flashcards, Multiple Choice, and Cloze. The author advises leaving the Cloze (fill-in-the-blanks) exercise until last. In the Pronunciation exercise students practise pronouncing both individual Turkish words and whole sentences: they can also record their own output for comparison with the original.

In the Dictation exercise students type sentences in an on-screen box. They can listen to each original sentence more than once, or slow it down, or listen to a word-for-word reading. The program takes points off the overall score whenever learners make use of these facilities. Mistakes are highlighted and students are offered a chance to correct them. It is also possible for instructors to alter the default grading parameters or set the "No Scoring" option.

The Flashcards exercise presents students with a number of words from the lesson dialogue for them to memorise.

The Multiple Choice exercise tests students’ knowledge of the meaning of the words they have memorised and of basic grammatical rules.

Lastly, in the Cloze exercise students must fill blanks in sentences, either by typing in the correct word or by selecting it from a list.

With the exception of the Pronunciation exercise, all of the above exercises include a scoring element and offer the possibility of printing out students’ work. However, it is not possible to save students’ work to floppy disk.

The Grammar section is rather schematic and requires some prior knowledge of grammatical labels. Lastly, the section called Cultural Dimensions of Turkish aims to give students information about the semantic categories with which they need to become familiar, such as colours, days of the week, main political parties, important rivers, names of geographical areas, etc. However, this section is rather disappointing, as it mostly consists of lists of Turkish words and their English translations, with no other cultural information.

Technical aspects

The package is extremely easy to install, but only a very limited amount of technical documentation is included in the package (in the Readme.txt file). For more comprehensive technical information users are referred to the Internet site of the Critical Languages Series.

The package co-ordinates audio, video, graphics and text in an excellent way. Navigation is easy, screens are pleasing to the eye, the layout is simple and the functions of buttons and icons are intuitive. Moreover, the "Context Help" button featured in every screen enables students to click on any unidentified objects to obtain information. Students can exit each screen at any time to select a new section. The only skills needed to start using the program are basic IT skills and some typing skills.

The quality of the video and audio recordings is very good. However, only two actors, a man and a woman, feature in the video clips: this means that whenever the dialogue requires the presence of two men or two women, we see the same person in two different shots, wearing different clothes. The resulting effect is rather poor.

As far as graphics is concerned, the beautiful pictures of Turkish landscapes and landmarks placed at the beginning of every lesson bear little or no relevance to the content of the latter. Perhaps more effort could have gone into integrating graphics and text to give students further contextual clues: for example, a picture of a Turkish policeman could have been placed at the beginning of the lesson "At the police station".

The inclusion of a revision section at the end of every lesson would further enhance the already considerable learning potential of the package.

Conclusions

Despite the above-mentioned shortcomings, the degree of interactivity achieved by the package is high: students make decisions (choice of lesson, choice of exercise), enter answers and receive feedback from the program at every step of the way. Therefore, the package is a useful tool for self-study of the Turkish language.

Annalisa Sandrelli
University of Hull

December 200

Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics, and Area Studies