Classroom Materials to Support Turkish-Speaking Children in Dutch Secondary Schools

Abstract

While research has shown that using the mother tongue in foreign language education is beneficial (Ammar et al., 2010; Spada et al., 2005; McManus & Marsden, 2019), not much research has focused on how to actively implement the mother tongue in education (Ellis & Shintani, 2014). This Master Thesis attempts to fill this gap by creating classroom materials specifically designed for Turkish-speaking students in the Netherlands who are learning English in secondary school. The goal of this thesis was to create classroom materials for this target group which involves both their mother tongue (Turkish) and the target language (English). These materials were designed according to seven guidelines which were composed from the literature study. The materials were reviewed via a survey by four English teachers who teach at a secondary school in the Netherlands. Their feedback was used to create the final version of the classroom materials. Adjustments of the materials included adding speaking and listening assignments so that all skills were included, changing email assignments into WhatsApp and Instagram assignments so that they would relate better to students’ own lives, changing the font and font size to make the materials more accessible to all students, adding an example sentence to each assignment to improve clarity, and having students do assignments together to improve interaction. This thesis concludes that materials such as these can be beneficial for Turkish students learning English, as research points out that participants who receive contrastive information about their first language (L1) and second language (L2) perform better than participants who do not (Ammar et al., 2010). However, no conclusions can be drawn on the effectiveness of the materials, as they were not tested with students.