Sinema Tutkusu: Turkish Language and Culture through Film is a communicative OER textbook that uses engaging, authentic cultural materials — feature films from Türkiye. Advanced learners and their instructors may use for different purposes: self-study, classroom instruction, tutoring, or as a pastime. Each of the ten chapters in Sinema Tutkusu focuses on a critically acclaimed film that will appeal to the interests of adult learners with Advanced Low-to-Mid proficiency in Turkish and increase their understanding of historical and contemporary Turkish-speaking culture. The lessons integrate viewing, listening and reading comprehension, writing and speaking practice, grammar, vocabulary and cultural activities. Designed for today’s student, Sinema Tutkusu is more than just a textbook—it is a space in which students can ‘meet’ the people of Türkiye through the big screen and experience Turkish language and culture as it is performed in context.
Features:
- Hazırlanalım und Arka Plan sections provide pre-viewing exercises that prepare students for a positive and effective viewing experience.
- Scene studies allow learners to deal closely with each film through didacticized clips with pre, during and post viewing activities.
- Readings – ranging from film reviews, criticism and interviews to poems, speeches and songs – relate thematically to each film.
- Speaking and writing activities invite learners to think critically about each film’s genre, themes and cinematic style and to actively synthesize the film’s linguistic and cultural content.
- Film-derived grammar exercises provide learners with a thorough advanced grammar trajectory while facilitating practice of key grammar in context.
- Ten appealing films are easily available (links to view the films online or purchase them)
Project Description
Sinema Tutkusu introduces different approaches to studying cinema, while also providing learners with the tools to achieve Advanced High (or even Superior) proficiency in modern Turkish. Learners will watch and analyze a wide range of films, including popular, arthouse, auteur-made, generic, and independent works, and examine the reception of those films. Learners will discuss the socio-political contexts, industrial trends, aesthetic sensitivities and representation strategies of selected films to determine what constitutes Turkish cinema as a ‘national cinema’ and identify the ways in which its constitutive elements are part of transnational movements. By constantly reformulating the essential question of “what Turkish cinema is,” Sinema Tutkusu prompts learners to seek to understand how Turkey’s filmmakers, critics, cultural policymakers, and viewers have answered this question in different historical periods, and how they themselves might answer it today.
The project is designed as a set of ten modules that can be completed in part or in full, depending on the interests and needs of the learners and their instructors.