Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar! is a multimedia textbook with supplementary materials for intermediate Turkish language learners, developed by Dr. Jeannette Okur at the University of Texas at Austin and published by the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning under the U.S. Department of Education Title VI Grant #P229A180003, with additional support from the UT Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services and the UT Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
The textbook, YouTube channel and WordPress/H5P site comprise an openly licensed curriculum focused on developing Intercultural Communicative Competence. The four units invite learners to engage with culturally rich print, audio and video texts and use the target language to investigate, explain and reflect on the relationship between contemporary Turks’ socio-cultural practices, products, and perspectives. Each unit addresses a different aspect of society: family, love and marriage, the environment, and art and politics, and contains the following components:
- contextualized grammar lessons
- videos of Turks speaking about their lives and their country
- activities that hone language skills while raising awareness about contemporary Turkish society
- interactive, auto-correct exercises that facilitate learners’ acquisition of vocabulary and syntax structures
The Her Şey Bir Merhaba ile Başlar! textbook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. It is now downloadable for free in PDF or adaptable Google Docs format and is also available for purchase as a print-on-demand book from Lulu.com and Amazon.com.