Reply to comment

Published with an approval from author sagymengl.

An article that has recently appeared on Azattyq makes a number of debatable claims.

The first is that “in order to learn Kazakh, one should know Russian.” This is difficult to sustain. From my own teaching experience, I know that even if learners don’t know Russian, they can acquire the Cyrillic alphabet in a short period of time. The alphabet is the only element that Kazakh and Russian have in common. Unlike Russian, Kazakh is an agglutinative language that is based on sound harmony and on adding suffixes to the roots of words. Moreover, with the exception of a few Russian loanwords, Kazakh derives most of its vocabulary from ancient Turkic, Arabic and Persian.

Second, the article claims that it is difficult to learn Kazakh because there is no methodology of teaching Kazakh. It seems that many people adhere to this opinion, but I think that many linguists and teachers of Kazakh would disagree. Especially because this opinion appears to be an implicit criticism of Kazakh teachers. What is a methodology of teaching? It is a set of techniques that teachers apply in their teaching. It is not some kind of super-theory that a ministry of education should provide. After all, the methods that have been proposed over the years (the grammar-translation method, the direct method, the audio-lingual method, the communicative method) are purely theoretical.

In practice, good teachers (and most Kazakh teachers are good) integrate a variety of techniques in their lessons, because their purpose is to improve all 4 language skills: reading, writing, comprehension and speaking. What Kazakh teachers need is not an abstract methodology, but more resources. They need professionally made books and dictionaries, and training seminars where they can exchange their teaching experiences. Internet forums would be very helpful, too, except that most Kazakh teachers don’t have access to the internet.

I am curious to hear what my readers think about these issues.

To read this post in Kazakh, click here.