A Prosodic Approach to Teaching Turkish to Foreigners - Turkish Stress Productions of Bosnian Speakers

Abstract

The elements that constitute the sound structure of the language are divided into two parts as "segmental" and "suprasegmental". While the parts are related to the phonemes we call "vowel" and "consonant", suprasegmental units of the language include prosodic features such as stress, tone, rhythm, and pause that function over a holistic part. Prosodic features directly affect the units that constitute the structural features of the language. Although this effect is valid for prosodic languages, it also affects the target language in learning a new language process. It is possible for an individual learning the target language to shape the structural elements in this language correctly, by acquiring the correct prosody. Since the prosodic units directly affect the emotion, thought and meaning of the fragmented units, it is necessary to acquire these units simultaneously with the structural features in language acquisition. For this reason, it is important and useful for the development of basic language skills, especially speaking skills, to carry out meaningful and appropriate suprasegmental units such as emphasis, as well as fragmentary units in the target language. In this sense, the developing technology makes it possible to make prosodic features visible in the computer environment through sound analysis programs such as PRAAT. In this study, sentence and word stress productions in Turkish pronunciations of 25 female and 15 male speakers between the ages of 15-20 whose mother tongue is Bosnian are examined. The Turkish stress production of Bosnian speakers was measured with the PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2020) program and interpreted within the framework of the achieved stress graphics. According to the results obtained from the research, it was determined that the Turkish sentence and word stresses in the reading texts vocalised by the Bosnian speakers at the basic level often do not match the pronunciation of the native speakers.