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| istanbul city One of the many smaller, but often no less distinguished, mosques in Istanbul dotting the Bosphorous shoreline. |
Turkey is a fascinating place with a rich history. Secular in many respects, but with a large, relatively homogeneous and Muslim population, its ongoing quest to develop economically and progress socially, as can be seen by the present round of EU membership negotiations and a more general opening-up to foreign exchanges of all kinds, is bringing inherent political, economic, and social tensions and contradictions to the fore.
I came here several months ago to teach English as a foreign language (EFL) at a private merchant marine academy on Turkey’s rather splendid southeastern Mediterranean coast. I spent an intense month there before moving on to work at a Berlitz language center in Istanbul, the country’s financial, business, and cultural center.
Teaching English is a growing business in Istanbul and throughout Turkey. The Berlitz Istanbul franchise has two schools on the European side and two more up and running on the Asian side of the city. Work on a third is well under way.
English Time
It’s a Tuesday night in mid-March and I’ve been hanging around Berlitz Istanbul’s flagship school and office most of the day waiting to teach my first class. It begins around 6:30 p.m. and comes together in piecemeal fashion as five of my scheduled group of eight intermediate English language students assemble first in the kitchen to have a nosh of simit, something of a cross between a sesame seed bagel and a pretzel, and then head over to the small, efficient modern office style classroom.
As I’ve found is typical on the first day or night of a class, the students eye me somewhat warily. I’ve been told by my teacher trainer that they liked their previous teacher, so I expect that they will look to judge me against that standard.
The class turns out to be a mixed and friendly group eager to learn about foreigners and practice their English. Two are engineers from a company that manufactures boiler systems for export, another tough-talking but good-natured middle aged woman is a criminal lawyer, one is a young wife who has traveled abroad and just landed a secretarial job with a Turkish company that also does international business. The group is rounded out by a new father who is the limousine service manager for Shering-Plough’s Turkish subsidiary, two software engineers, and a well-read, middle-aged accountant who has also worked abroad.
Most come here on their employer’s tab and are taking English to help them at work and in their careers. But in class, which begins at 7:30 p.m. and lasts two hours every Tuesday and Thursday night, they mostly want to talk about life in general, their likes and dislikes, popular culture and to share their experiences and opinions.
Three of the five have taken the previous Level 5 class together while the other two are new to the group and to Berlitz. I quickly break the ice and happily find out that their English is better than I had expected and for the most part really is at an intermediate level. Though their comprehension and vocabulary are good, their spoken English lags a bit, particularly their grammar and pronunciation, which is not at all surprising or uncommon given that outside the classroom they don’t communicate orally in English much. This is English as a “foreign language” after all.
At language school franchises like Berlitz, you are trained to follow and urged to adhere strictly to a particular method, usually a communicative approach to second language acquisition that involves relying as exclusively as possible on the target language, using dialogues, conversations, role plays, and visual aids that have to do with common situations in order to model, illustrate, learn, and acquire spoken language skills and aural comprehension.
Invariably, teachers wind up meandering from the textbook and CD-ROM material a bit, going off on tangents suggested by students and mixing in their own materials that cover more practical aspects of the modern English language.
As the group is small and my students are adults honestly interested in other people, cultures, and the world any barriers quickly collapse. If you really tune in and listen to them, you can tailor the course to fit their needs, get along well, and still cover the material that is required. We hit it off well from the first night of class and as they are quick learners with a good basic foundation, I don’t mind meandering off the textbook path, letting students lead us into topic areas that otherwise would not be covered and using them to illustrate new language skills.
As to why Turks want to learn English, the reasons are numerous and varied. But there are a few common threads. Perhaps the single most important reason Turks are signing up for relatively expensive English language courses, such as those offered by Berlitz, is a very practical one: English has become the de facto international language of business, education and diplomacy. Even if you are doing business with a European, German or Japanese person, chances are that your common language will be English. And as is true in a large and growing number of countries, Turks are exposed to English at an early age.
Most Turkish primary schools provide a basic English language course or courses as part of their curriculum. This is even more true at the university level, where most students are either required to do a year’s worth of preparatory English coursework or where a sizable percentage of courses, typically around 30 percent, are taught in English. Most of the 30 percent, however, were given in the first year and a half of their studies and by non-native English speaking Turkish professors.
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