Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
GIS SCIENCE JOURNAL, cilt.12, sa.8, ss.188-197, 2025 (Scopus)
Analysis of the German folk tale "The Wishing Table, the Gold-Ass and the Cudgel in
the Sack" and the Turkish folk tale "The Cudgel in the Sack" in the context of the
intercultural approach used in foreign language teaching
Doç. Dr. Şerif ORUÇ
Gazi Üniversitesi, Gazi Eğitim Fakültesi, Yaban Diller Eğitimi, Ankara, Türkiye
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8452-305X
Abstract
For many years, foreign language teaching was done with methods aimed at teaching reading
and writing skills. In the peaceful climate that emerged with the fall of the Berlin Wall in
November 1989 and the end of the cold wars in the world, people from different countries
started to go to developed countries more frequently and easily. Their aim was to do business
in those countries, to receive education, science and technology, and for some, just to do
tourism. In recent years, there has been intense migration to developed countries due to different
reasons. This increasing human traffic between countries has led to the coming together of
people from different cultures. Therefore, in order for people from different cultures to live
together without any problems and to establish healthy communication, they need to learn the
culture of the society whose language they are learning. In other words, a person who is going
to Germany needs to learn the German language as well as the culture of the German people.
Those who want to go to England should learn the English culture, and those who want to go
to France should learn the French culture. Due to this need, a new foreign language teaching
method, the “intercultural approach”, has been used since the late 1990s.
This situation has led foreign language teachers to use materials that convey the language
together with its culture. For this purpose, materials such as novels, stories, tales, plays and
films, which reflect the culture of the society whose language is being learned, were used.
Accordingly, in order to contribute to foreign language teachers, especially German language
teachers, we wanted to reveal cultural elements by choosing an example from German and
Turkish fairy tales (German Fairy Tale: " The Wishing Table, the Gold-Ass and the Cudgel in
the Sack " and Turkish Fairy Tale: "The Cudgel in the Sack "). We compared the similarities
and differences in the past and present usage of the cultural elements we identified in Turkish
and German fairy tales (lying and stealing). We presented our evaluations on this subject in our
study, which we addressed in detail.
Keywords: foreign language teaching, language-culture, intercultural, tale and culture
1. INTRODUCTION