Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Bulletin For Technology and History , sa.Volume 25 Issue 8, ss.33-41, 2025 (Scopus)
Abstract
The needs and desires of people living in our country to learn languages continue to increase
day by day. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of East and West Germany, and
in addition, when the Soviet Union, the locomotive country of the structure called the Warsaw
Pact, collapsed, an environment where winds of peace were blowing in our world emerged.
This process caused an increase in trade, tourism, technology exchange and student and teacher
exchange in the field of education between countries. All these developments increased the
desire of people in our country to go abroad to developed countries and learn a foreign language
in order to have better economic opportunities and a better and freer standard of living after the
1990s. This situation led to the coming together of people from different cultures. In order for
them to communicate and adapt easily to each other, it became necessary to learn the culture of
the country where the foreign language is learned.
These developments led to the emergence of the “intercultural approach” by adding culture to
the communicative approach, which was used effectively until the 1990s, and since then it has
become one of the most widely used foreign language teaching methods. The effective use of
this method has created a greater need for materials reflecting German culture. Starting from
this point, we wanted to reveal cultural elements by selecting one example from German and
Turkish folk tales (German folk tale: “Allerleirauh = Thousand and One Feathers” and Turkish
folk tale: “Tüylüce=Fluffy”) in order to contribute to foreign language teachers, especially
German language teachers. We compared the similarities and differences in the past and present
usage of the cultural elements we identified in Turkish and German folk tales (“promisetestament
and guest-foreigner”). We presented the findings of our analysis and evaluations in
this study.
Keywords: foreign language teaching, language-culture, interculturality, folk tale and culture