Improving Turkish Language Training Materials: Grapheme-to- Phoneme Conversion for adding Phonemic Transcription into Dictionary Entries and Course Books

Course materials for teaching Turkish as a second language lack information about the pronunciation of Turkish. These materials have chapters about the alphabet and the pronunciations of the letters, but they lack notation as phonemic transcription. Also Turkish dictionaries lack phonemic transcription information with the false belief that Turkish alphabet is a phonemic one. However there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the letters in the alphabet and the phonemes of Turkish. In this respect, this study aims at developing a grapheme-to-phoneme/allophone conversion tool for Turkish. The output of the software can be used in course materials for teaching Turkish as a second language, and Turkish dictionaries for learners.