Speaking Turkish in Belgian primary schools: teacher beliefs versus effective consequences

In this mixed-method study, we explore teachers’ beliefs concerning the use of the Turkish language by Turkish children in Belgian primary schools, and we compare these findings with the effective consequences of language maintenance. The qualitative analyses revealed thatteachers have very negative views about the use of the Turkish language, as they believe that speaking the mother tongue is detrimental to academic achievement. These adverse teacher beliefs are not only shaped by the assimilationist policy context in Belgium, but they are also (re)produced and reinforced by interactions between teachers and the Turkish middle-class. Nevertheless, the quantitative analyses with a data of 435 Turkish pupils in 48 schools have shown that there is no evidence that speaking Turkish, at home or at school, harms pupils’ academic achievement. However, the negative school culture about the Turkish language causes feelings of rejection and reduces the sense of school belonging for pupils who speak Turkish more frequently at schoo

Опанування граматичних категорій турецької мови у контексті двомовності.

The paper presents results form a study on acquisition of Turkish grammatical categories by first grade Turkish speaking minority children in Bulgarian primary school. Two groups of children speakers of Turkish are tested: ethnic Turks and ethnic Roma. The Roma are Muslims and are also speakers of Turkish. Both groups speak the Northeast variety of Turkish, spoken in the surroundings of Varna, Bulgaria. The author examines the lexical reaches, syntax complexity and narrative knowledge of the children and predicts that the low results on mother tongue tests will be a reason for difficulties in the second language acquisition - Bulgarian. The author connects the results of mother tongue knowledge of the children with the language interdependence theory of Cummins (1991), where the level of the mother tongue is a predictor of second language acquisition.У поданій статті представлено результати проведеного дослідження, що присвячене опануванню граматичних категорій турецької мови учнями першого класу турецької мовної меншини в болгарській початковій школі. В цьому тестуванні взяли участь дві групи дітей, які спілкуються турецькою: етнічні турки та етнічні роми. Роми, котрі стали учасниками дослідження, є мусульманами та розмовляють турецькою. Обидві протестовані групи говорять на північно-східній різноманітності турецької мови, якою розмовляють на околицях м. Варна, Болгарія. Автор досліджує лексичний запас, синтаксичну складність та наративні знання дітей і робить припущення, що низькі результати під час тестування рідної мови можуть стати причиною труднощів при освоєнні другої мови болгарської. Автор пов’язує результати знань рідної мови у дітей з теорією взаємозалежності мови Кумінса (1991), згідно якої рівень володіння рідною мовою є предиктором вивчення другої мови

A prototype machine translation system between Turkmen and Turkish

In this work, we present a prototype system for translation of Turkmen texts into Turkish. Although machine translation (MT) is a very hard task, it is easier to implement a MT system between very close language pairs which have similar syntactic structure and word order. We implement a direct translation system between Turkmen and Turkish which performs a word-to-word transfer. We also use a Turkish Language Model to find the most probable Turkish sentence among all possible candidate translations generated by our system

Statistical dependency parsing of Turkish

This paper presents results from the first statistical dependency parser for Turkish. Turkish is a free-constituent order language with complex agglutinative inflectional and derivational morphology and presents interesting challenges for statistical parsing, as in general, dependency relations are between “portions” of words called inflectional groups. We have explored statistical models that use different representational units for parsing. We have used the Turkish Dependency Treebank to train and test our parser but have limited this initial exploration to that subset of the treebank sentences with only left-to-right non-crossing dependency links. Our results indicate that the best accuracy in terms of the dependency relations between inflectional groups is obtained when we use inflectional groups as units in parsing, and when contexts around the dependent are employed

Initial explorations in English to Turkish statistical machine translation

This paper presents some very preliminary results for and problems in developing a statistical machine translation system from English to Turkish. Starting with a baseline word model trained from about 20K aligned sentences, we explore various ways of exploiting morphological structure to improve upon the baseline system. As Turkish is a language with complex agglutinative word structures, we experiment withmorphologically segmented and disambiguated versions of the parallel texts in order to also uncover relations between morphemes and function words in one language with morphemes and functions words in the other, in addition to relations between open class content words. Morphological segmentation on the Turkish side also conflates the statistics from allomorphs so that sparseness can be alleviated to a certain extent. We find that this approach coupled with a simple grouping of most frequent morphemes and function words on both sides improve the BLEU score from the baseline of 0.0752 to 0.0913 with the small training data. We close with a discussion on why one should not expect distortion parameters to model word-local morpheme ordering and that a new approach to handling complex morphotactics is needed

The Effect of Content Instruction in L2 on L1 Pragmatics

This study investigates whether content instruction in English has an impact on L1 pragmatics. In this study a discourse completion test with eight request situations in Turkish was given to three groups of Turkish students enrolled in undergraduate programs in a faculty of education in Turkey. One group of students received most of their education in English. The other two groups received their education in Turkish. An interesting finding is that the differences in the make-up of the situations were only observed in situations with high imposition. This shows that instruction in the foreign language has an impact on sociopragmatic interpretation in L1. Overall, the results reveal that instruction in foreign language has an impact on first language pragmatic use