I teach beginning, intermediate and advanced Turkish. The goal of these courses is to build communicative and cultural proficiency. Beginning Turkish aims at giving an overview of general Turkish grammar, using concrete situations, engendering in the students the skills of getting around in Turkey as well as preparing them for further work in Turkish. There is also an emphasis on reading simple materials such as ads, headlines, invitations, poetry, children's books and on writing dialogues, directions, descriptions, summaries and simple stories. Intermediate Turkish introduces complex grammar, and readings of short stories, travel writings, plays and of newspaper articles.
Oral work is built on the reading pieces.
Conversations about and analysis of the specific pieces become jumping points to more general discussions. Writing assignments become longer and more complex. Advanced Turkish is an introductory course to Turkish literature geared to acquaint students with canonical prose and poetic works, and with films. This course is conducted in seminar style with reading assignments, short written papers, and oral reports as well as class projects. I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.