Why Turks can’t speak English?

Exclusive Interview with Academic Dr. Ufuk Keleş

Şahin Aybek: The failure to effectively teach and learn English as a foreign language in Turkey has persisted for many years. In your view, what is the most fundamental reason for this ongoing problem?

Dr. Ufuk Keleş (Faculty Member, Bahçeşehir University): This is a question that has preoccupied me and many of my colleagues specializing in language teaching for years. Unfortunately, providing a direct, short answer to the root causes is not possible.

In my opinion, the first and most prominent reason is the exam-oriented teaching and learning approach. In Turkey, English is viewed by teachers, parents, and students not primarily as a tool for communication, but as a subject where the main goal is to mark the correct choices on standardized tests. This approach extends to civil servant recruitment, academic appointments, criteria for language bonuses, and similar issues. Consequently, students can spend years in English classes and graduate without gaining any concrete, communicative usage skills outside of “scoring high on the exam.”

The most widely accepted modern method for language acquisition is Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which prioritizes the development of the four core skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Grammar and vocabulary acquisition are secondary in this method, supporting the development of those core skills. However, the exam-focused approach presents a serious challenge—even a threat—to CLT. Exam-focused education prioritizes grammar and vocabulary, pushing the four core skills into the background. This directly leads to the frequently heard complaint: “I can understand, but I cannot speak.”

Worse still, many teachers working in schools, universities, or language courses learned English through this same exam-focused method, making it difficult for them to successfully implement skills-based teaching. Factors such as insufficient foundational training, lack of professional development, and limited personal use of the language in daily life further complicate the solution. Teachers who haven’t learned the language by using it in real-life, speaking, and making mistakes are inevitably forced to reduce English instruction to grammar rules and vocabulary lists.

The Impact of Constant Curricular Changes

Şahin Aybek: How does the frequent alteration of the education system affect this learning process?

Dr. Keleş: This is a multifaceted issue. Language teaching is never purely an academic subject in any country; it has social, economic, historical, and political dimensions, often driven by economic and political factors. Continuous, radical overhauls of the curriculum, particularly driven by economic and political motives, create serious instability for students, teachers, and institutions.

As a young republic, Turkey has often changed its language teaching curriculum to meet the demands of the era, redefine the position of its citizens on international platforms, and balance global developments with local needs. While continuity and quality require a stable, long-term educational plan, we often shift direction every few years. This prevents teachers from deepening their expertise and developing effective methodologies.

“Perhaps enriching the existing curriculum with contemporary opportunities, rather than completely changing it, could yield much more effective results.”

Every major change means new resources, new textbooks, new learning outcomes, and new assessment methods—all requiring substantial budgets. Working on and renewing the existing curriculum—where we already know the strengths and weaknesses—might be a less costly, more experience-based, and ultimately more effective approach than starting from scratch.

Linguistic Differences and Structural Challenges

Şahin Aybek: I am not a linguist, but I know there are significant linguistic differences between English and Turkish. Could these differences impact the problem of language teaching in Turkey?

Dr. Keleş: That is a very accurate observation. Turkish and English are structurally very different languages. Turkish is an agglutinative language, and its word structure and sentence construction differ significantly from English.

Speakers of Indo-European languages—such as Spanish, German, French, and even Farsi—learn other languages within the same family much more easily than Turkish speakers. Grammatical similarities and cognates (words derived from a common root) simplify the process for them. In contrast, when Turkish native speakers approach English, particularly grammar topics, by thinking in Turkish, the word order, tense usage, and sentence logic become “unnatural.” This complicates the learning process.

While this is certainly not an insurmountable obstacle, teaching methodologies are often not designed to specifically support these differences. If students were guided to understand the logical differences between the two languages, I believe learning could progress much faster.

Infrastructure and Practice Opportunities

Şahin Aybek: Learning environments and infrastructure are also cited as influential factors. What is the situation here?

Dr. Keleş: Infrastructure deficiencies in many Turkish schools are a serious problem. Classrooms are crowded, technological equipment is limited, and supplementary materials are scarce. In some schools, there isn’t even an English teacher, or one teacher must cover multiple schools. All of this pushes foreign language learning far below the planned level.

Language learning requires personalized applications, high-quality materials blended auditorily, visually, and textually, and access to environments where students can use what they have learned. Due to infrastructure shortages, education is often reduced to “grammar lessons read from a book,” and language acquisition loses its meaning.

It’s crucial to remember that teaching is a profession requiring pedagogical formation, classroom management skills, and material preparation expertise. As educators specializing in English Language Teaching, we have a vital duty to equip our pre-service teachers with the skills to overcome potential infrastructure deficits they may face. While it is important to be able to teach when conditions are met, it is also essential to learn how to do the best possible job with limited resources.

Şahin Aybek: Finally, the issue of practical opportunity is often raised. Why is this such a major problem?

Dr. Keleş: To give a brief answer: Practice is crucial because the golden rule of language learning is that if you don’t use it, it won’t become permanent. As the English saying goes: “Use it or lose it!”

However, the problem in Turkey is that students have very limited opportunities to use English in real communicative settings. The number of people they can speak English with in daily life is either very restricted or non-existent. Within the school, class time is limited, and speaking activities often do not fit into the schedule due to the focus on grammar-based instruction. Natural environments where students can enter the cycle of listening, speaking, making mistakes, and improving are not created.

In my own experience—despite having achieved a top ranking in the university entrance exam for foreign languages—I couldn’t utter a single sentence in class for my first two years of university. It was only after spending a summer working as a receptionist in Alanya that I gained the courage to speak in class.

Compared to my time (the late ’90s, early 2000s), we now have vastly more opportunities for language learning. The internet provides an incredible number of online and offline resources, tools, and applications. However, we seem slow to integrate these opportunities into formal education. Still, informal learning, or out-of-school learning, holds immense importance for today’s students. Perhaps enriching the existing curriculum with contemporary opportunities, rather than completely changing it, could yield much more effective results.