Comments of Prospective Turkish Teachers on Learning Turkish as a Foreign Language

This study aims to investigate the views of prospective teachers of Turkish on different aspects of learning Turkish as a foreign language. 120 third-year student teachers at the faculty of education of a Turkish public university participated in the study. They were asked to answer a list of open ended questions and 15 of them were interviewed. The qualitative data were analysed with the content analysis method at the end of which some themes were obtained. The findings could be discussed under the following headings: (1) motives for learning Turkish, (2) challenges of learning Turkish, and (3) identity issues in learning Turkish.