Problems with teaching the word order of English to Turkish students

Abstract

The topic of this paper, is the problems related to the teaching of the word-order of English to university students in Turkey. This paper is also a study into the ways EFL teachers can solve those problems. Since English and Turkish come from two entirely different language families, the word-orders of these two languages do not look alike. Therefore, Turkish learners of English have a lot of difficulties in learning the syntax system of English. Studying and analyzing the types of errors which Turkish learners of English produce will give us an idea of the ways we can overcome the problems as well. To be able to do this study, a thorough literature review was conducted in order to collect information as to what syntax is, why it is important, how we can discriminate between "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" and how we can analyze students' errors and correct them. Furthermore, data were collected in order to discern the errors and transfers which were made by a limited sample of students. The focus has especially been on students' written performances. The syntactic errors they made while they were writing were discerned by a thorough analysis of their papers. Then, these errors were classified and analyzed on the basis of the theoretical studies reviewed in the professional literature. In Section 2, what syntax is and how we analyze sentences are discussed. The theoretical basis on which the analytical obtained through the analysis are introduced in Section 4, Finally, learner strategies which are considered to be directly related to the errors that learners make are summarized in Section 5. This section also includes some suggestions as to what EFL teachers can do to help students overcome the difficulties in learning/acquiring the word-order of English.