The Issue of Mother Tongue: Problems of Students Based on The Experience of Primary School Teachers

Abstract

After the Second World War, as a result of migration movements in Europe and America, we observed important changes in social structure of these countries. With these changes, in these countries, because of demand of migrants for learning their history, culture, language, multiculturalism and multilingualism are became important subjects of discussion. Nowadays, with the impact of globalization, cooperation and communication among the countries increased so much that we can no longer see any borders between countries. This situation has caused the creation of societies with multiculturalism and multilingualism in the countries. Recently, in Turkey, the presence of our many compatriots having different ethnic origins enabled us to discuss about multiculturalism and multilingualism in educational system. Impacts of these discussions are seen in many areas, especially in the area of education. Turkey is very rich and diverse cultural aspects. Therefore, different languages other than Turkish, which is the official language, are also spoken in the various regions of Turkey. In particular, in the region of the Black Sea, in the East and Southeast Anatolia, a lot of children start primary school without knowing enough Turkish language and this causes various problems. In our research, the problems of students in primary school who do not know enough Turkish language are determined by taking into account the experience of teachers who do not speak the language spoken in the region. In this study, we used the phenomenological motif which is one of the qualitative research motifs. 10 teachers of primary school participated in the research; data were collected through interviews and they were analysed by using the thematic analysis approach. Conclusions of this research show us that students with these limitations have problems for expressing themselves in the study, understanding and perception of serious problems, academic failure, introversion and social exclusion. Based on the findings obtained from the research, for the development of educational programs, it is recommended that is necessary to take account regional differences and in terms of teachers’ training, we should make modifications by including the criteria of multiculturalism and multilingualism