The image of German(y) of Turkish students in the German language learning process

Abstract

Besides language teaching, cultural promotion and intercultural communication are also among the general objectives of foreign language course books. Learning a foreign language means learning the countries, societies and cultures of the target language owing to the close relation between language and culture. How much and to what extent cultural transmission should be included in a foreign language course book and how informational content will be determined remain controversial. In foreign language teaching, there are those who think that cultural transmission is a natural reflection and those who argue that it is a cultural propaganda. However, it would not be wrong to say that there is also an image-making process through language teaching for the country and people of target language(s).This study is conducted to examine the opinions and comments of the university preparatory school students, who had no previous German instruction, on Germany, German people and German language with a questionnaire in line with their language levels after one-year German instruction. The questions and statements in the questionnaire are prepared on the basis of the content of the three-volume German course book 'Lagune', studied for the whole academic year. With some questions and statements, students are asked to make generalizations using the knowledge they have acquired and subjective judgments they have made. Two basic questions are sought to be answered by the response analysis of the questions and statements: 1. How much of the basic historical, geographical, political and social information in the course book has been learnt? 2. How do the students perceive German people and German social life subjectively as a result of cultural transmission through the course book?The results show that the students have difficulties in the process of learning German and consider German a difficult language although they generally have an average amount of objective knowledge about geographical, historical, political and social issues of Germany and that they have positive attitudes to German individual, social and family life. Another point that has been indicated by the results is that the students take more interest in cultural issues which reflect various aspects of daily life than numerical and static information and data during foreign language learning process.