Miswriting in the Teaching of Turkish as a Foreign Language: The Tunisian Case

Abstract

This research was undertaken with the aim of evaluating, classifying, and detecting mistakes made by Tunisian students learning Turkish as a foreign language at the A1 level. The study is descriptive and was performed using document and content analysis methods. Forty Tunisian university students participating in the study were asked to write about their emotions, ideas, and plans after being given a topic in the classroom at a specific time. Afterwards, their incidences of miswriting were determined while analyzing the texts. Their mistakes were classified under the headings of spelling mistakes, morphemic mistakes, phonetic mistakes, syntactic mistakes, and semantic mistakes. The writing errors grouped within these categories were subsequently re-evaluated according to their specific features and presented again under more narrow subheadings. It was determined that the students made 206 spelling mistakes, equaling 39.84% of the total, followed by 119 morphemic mistakes equaling 23.01%, 95 phonetic mistakes equaling 18.37%, 52 syntactic mistakes equaling 10.05%, and 45 semantic mistakes equaling 8.70%, for a total of 517 writing errors. The majority of these incidences of miswriting happened due to factors such as negative transfer, the distinctive structure of the Turkish language, and the students’ lack of knowledge and experience. It is emphasized that writing-oriented error analysis studies in the teaching of Turkish as a foreign language should be increased and continued at all levels.