Back in Lessons - Week 43

After a long vacation, this week, we have started lessons again. Since we were fresh after the vacation, it has been a good start for this week.

In English class, today, we have started with punctuation and punctuation errors. Although I think that I am not that much bad in punctuation, it has still been a very good review for me to see how successful I  am in punctuation. After a general review of punctuation marks, we had an interesting task: we were assigned to put the correct punctuation marks in their places in a text in which all the punctuation marks, except for fullstops, were deleted. In fact, it was a hard one to deal with because the author of the text seemed to have his own way of writing, but still we could work it out. After placing the punctuation marks in our texts, we changed our texts with other groups and we tried to figure out each other's errors so that the text made sense and we could help each other. Then, we could see how good we are in punctuation and which point we should review. It was also interesting to hear about punctuation in Danish as well since some of the punctuation errors are the result of negative transfer from the native language, both for Danish and Turkish. Now, I have the chance to think about what kind of errors I do in using the punctuation while writing and what might cause this. In this way, I can learn from my own mistakes so that I can help my students in punctuation when I am a teacher.

Then, we also talked about the language policies and adopting words from English, for both Danish and Turkish. Some people are quite concerned about this issue because they think that they can lose their national identity if they keep adopting words from English. It is the case not only in Denmark but also in Turkey because we, in Turkey,  don't have a language policy as well. To some extent, one can argue that it might be dangerous to adopt too many words from other languages, however it is still not a that much vital issue  to worry about. Even English vocabulary includes twenty per cent of French words. Language is a dynamic concept and it is very natural that languages influence each other. For me, as long as it is limited with the adopting words and that is nothing to do with the changes in morphology or the basic sentence structure, I mean the basic features of a specific language which identifies that language, it is a natural process taking place. Anyway, if one considers the idea of "being an intercultural speaker in a globalized world", then he will probably feel that there is nothing to worry about whether we have a language policy or not.