1 Introduction

Plus ça change, plus c’est la mȇme chose—French Proverb.

Turkey, a uniquely bicontinental country, is in the northern hemisphere and the eastern part of the globe (measured from the Prime Meridian in Greenwich). A member of the United Nations since 1945 and NATO since 1952, Turkey presents a unique picture on the world map as a bridge connecting Asia to Europe. Turkey shares the geological and cultural borderline with European and West Asian countries. Being the interlocutor between the two worlds “…emphasizes the uniqueness of Turkey’s status as a socially Islamic but politically and diplomatically West-leaning country” (Park, 2012, p. 123).

Turkey is a multiethnic country with an approximate population of 82 million (CIA World FactBook, 2020). The country’s rich history has resulted in diversity in ethnic and linguistic groups such as Arabs, Armenians, Azeris, Kurds, Laz, Jews, and Zaza that are some ethnic minorities having existed in different regions of Anatolia for centuries.

The largest ethnic minority group in Turkey is the Kurds who speak Kurdish. Kurdish is a member of the Satem sub-group of the Indo-European language family as well as a member of the Iranian language branch under the Indo-Iranian sub-family. Turkish, on the other hand, is a Uralic-Altaic language, and it differs from Kurdish in its syntax, lexicon, and phonology (Fromkin & Rodman, 1992). The CIA World Factbook (2020) asserts that currently almost one fifth of the Turkish population (19 percent) is comprised of Kurds. This estimate gives us a Kurdish-speaking population of 13.8 million in Turkey out of a 78 million total population; however, May (2001) has estimated that approximately 15 million Kurds live in Turkey with only 3.9 million Kurds claiming to be native speakers of Kurdish. Since the very beginning of the Republic of Turkey, the existence of the Kurdish language and ethnic group has been actively rejected, denied, and repressed by the Turkish government; this ongoing repression negatively affects the accuracy of the data on the Kurdish population of Turkey (May, 2001).

Turkey applied for full European Economic Community (EEC) membership in 1987 and participated in the European Union (EU) customs union in 1995 (BBC News, 2012). Turkey’s EU accession process was slowed down and even stalled along the way due to debates on whether Turkey needed to take action to meet the membership criteria and whether this membership was really needed. In 2002, the Turkish Parliament finally approved reforms to secure EU membership; with this step, the death penalty and the bans on Kurdish education and broadcasting were abolished (BBC News, 2012). These reforms also protected Kurdish human rights such as the freedom to speak Kurdish and to receive education through Kurdish language. In 2003, the Turkish Parliament passed laws to ease restrictions on the freedom of speech and Kurdish language rights. After intense bargaining between the EU and Turkey, Turkey’s EU membership negotiations officially launched in October 2005; however, membership negotiations were stalled in December 2006 due to Turkey’s failure to open Turkish ports to Cypriot traffic. Currently, EU membership does not seem very likely for Turkey, and Turkey’s meager effort to respond to the conditions of the Kurdish issue is a partial cause of these prolonged membership attempts.

With their education systems, countries aim to overcome economic and social inequalities and advance in technology and information. Mostly, the achievement gap is the result of socioeconomic differences across nations and the pupils of different socioeconomic status (SES). The Economic, Social, and Cultural Status index (ESCS) that takes the socioeconomic status of each student into account to find out what percentage of student achievement can be explained by SES has proved that Turkey’s achievement gap between the low and high SES students is higher compared to other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (Blanchy & Şaşmaz, 2009). With approximately twenty percent of student achievement difference in Turkey explained by ESCS, there is a high correlation between Turkish students’ SES and achievement on the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Strikingly major variations in PISA 2018 scores in Turkey across socioeconomic status and regions have been reported (PISA, 2018; Turkey Preliminary Report, 2018). Most notably, the Kurdish-speaking children densely populated in eastern Anatolia had lower scores compared to their peers in the west or northwest of Turkey.

In his introduction of The Multilingual Turn, May (2014) aims to reposition multilingualism as a way to promote cultural and linguistic diversity and revisit its boundaries with second language acquisition (SLA), EFL, and bilingual education. Building from May’s framework, this chapter presents connections to the historical, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of Turkey for a strong grasp of the current policy decisions and reform movements in Turkey. In his report entitled “Language Policy in Globalized Contexts,” Reynolds (2019) reminds us of the constructive role of education systems to embrace minoritized populations and languages. The linguistic choices of nations bear disguised messages about the value put into a language or the appreciation of certain ethnic groups and their heritage. This chapter aims to overcome some of the continuing challenges by addressing the quest of Turkey in support of multilingualism and multiculturalism and setting goals for educational policy.

2 Language Planning

According to Kaplan and Baldauf (1997), “[l]anguage planning is a body of ideas, laws, regulations (language policy), change rules, beliefs, and practices intended to achieve the planned language change in the society, group or system” (p. 3). In other words, language planning is a deliberate and conscious attempt to bring changes to the language code. This kind of human intervention to reach desired goals is based on plans and measures (Spolsky, 2004). Language policy, the intended result of language planning, gives rise to the modification of the linguistic behavior of a community by promoting or discouraging a language in action.

Language policy and planning is very important because it has a direct impact on the society, economics, education, and culture. In the USA, for instance, the debate between “English-only” (in support of exclusive use of English language) and “English plus” (supporting learners’ home languages and cultures) movements established the two ends of the polarized debate on language policy which is a prevailing situation in the country. Numerous educational organizations including TESOL International Association and the American Association for Applied Linguistics support the latter policy (Wang, 2016; Wiley, 2013).

2.1 The De Jure and De Facto Languages

Both de jure and de facto language discrimination are prevalent in Turkey, especially during the last few decades when Turkey was on its way to EU membership. The official language, de jure, is protected by law and de facto language refers to the languages which may not be acknowledged legally by the government, yet they exist in the country (Baker, 2006). Turkish is the official (de jure) language of Turkey and the northern part of Cyprus. Turkish is also, in fact, the most commonly used language in Turkey. Kurdish is the second most widely spoken language following Turkish; yet, the existence of it as a language has been denied or ignored by the Turkish government until recently. Turkey’s attitude toward Kurdish as a minority language has been changing with its European Union (EU) membership attempts.

Cemiloğlu (2009) discussed two theoretical explanations on the sociopolitical shifts occurring in Turkey in the last decade and the consequences of these sociopolitical changes on Kurdish. During the early days of the Republic of Turkey, the nation-building model was adopted. Linguicide, based on Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson’s (1996) description, refers to a similar point where the favored pattern is one-state-one-language for a nation trying to establish its identity. The early policymakers supported the development of monolingualism that favored Turkish over all other existing varieties. The policymakers of these early times in the newly established state focused on the ethnic and linguistic dominance of Turks over other ethnic identities (Yavuz, 2001). This language policy caused the oppression of the Kurdish language for over seventy years (Cemiloğlu, 2009).

Although Turkish is the legal and official language and the language for the national education, the recently improving status of Kurdish is bringing intense discussions about the de jure and de facto language distinction. The recent movement toward EU accession has strengthened the status of the Kurdish language because the EU requires each member country to recognize the linguistic rights of the minorities. Thus, Turkey commenced national broadcasts in Kurdish. One of the channels of the national Turkish Radio Television Corporation (TRT 6* [*Shesh-meaning six in Kurdish]) has been broadcasting in Kurdish 24 h a day since January 1, 2009. TRT 6 broadcasts films, documentaries, music programs, and programs targeting children and women, produced in the Kurmanji, Sorani, and Zazaki dialects of Kurdish (Hürriyet Daily News, 2009).

In addition to Turkey’s attempts to acknowledge Kurdish through national broadcasting, Kurdish, based on Turkey’s Higher Education Council’s decision, is being offered as the language of instruction for Kurdish language and culture programs at the higher education level (Hürriyet Daily News, 2010). This can be seen as the preparatory step to establishing the basis for a long-term Kurdish-based education system in the country. The university programs offering Kurdish at higher education establish the necessary infrastructure of a new education system by educating future instructors who will teach Kurdish at primary and middle schools. The language planning for Kurdish aims to embrace the Kurdish language within the education system and to popularize literacy in Kurdish among its speakers. The long banned minority language, Kurdish, is on the verge of becoming one of the legally accepted languages in Turkey, and this is a significant step taken by the Turkish government whose constitution dictated monolingualism in Turkish.

2.1.1 The Indigenous Variety: Kurdish

Almost 15 million ethnic Kurds are reported to be living in Turkey and almost half of them claim Kurdish as their mother tongue. One of the major steps taken toward the linguistic human rights of the Kurds in Turkey was the preparation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (1990, para. 34) which warrants countries provide minorities with adequate opportunities to have education in their mother tongue. Both Turkish as the first and English as the second-language literacy are problematic in the eastern and southeastern regions of Turkey. This is due to the linguistic differences among the native (Kurdish), societal (Turkish), and foreign (English) languages to be learned. Simultaneous child bilingualism develops where two languages are acquired at the same time from birth (Baker, 2006) and Kurdish children of Turkey display an example of this by picking up Kurdish mainly at home and Turkish mostly in school. Most of the time, Kurdish pupils have oral proficiency in Kurdish and Turkish at home, and they start to develop written proficiency in Turkish once they start school (Minority Rights Group International Report, 2007). Kurdish children attending Grade 1 and speaking Kurdish are expected to learn the curriculum enacted in Turkish as the language of education. Even when they pass this threshold of mastering the educational language, they are expected to learn a foreign language, English. Thus, the literacy of Kurdish children in both Turkish and English is quite low compared to their peers in other regions with no Kurdish language background. The already low verbal and analytic skills of Turkish students in general are relatively lower in the eastern and southeastern regions (Berberoğlu & Kalender, 2005).

The initiator behind the Kurdish policy was the EU membership conditions that stipulated the acknowledgment of minority rights for speaking the mother tongue and maintaining their ethnic identity. The situation of the Kurds has been elevated to a point where Turkey’s policies were regarded as a violation of human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas & Buçak, 1994), and Turkey took action to change this negative image. The Kurds as an ethnic minority group in Turkey have been restricted by law to speak and receive education in their mother tongue of Kurdish. According to Skutnabb-Kangas and Buçak (1994), efforts “…to kill [the] Kurdish language by Turkey represents the most blatant example of linguicide this century” (p. 362)—and not allowing people to be associated with their mother tongue is one method of killing an ethnic group. Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson (1994), in this regard, proclaimed that the problem of Turkey was not the linguistic diversity per se but the lack of acknowledgement of the existence of diversity in the country. The Kurdish language community, which is divided, dispersed, and oppressed, had not been able to develop literacy skills in Kurdish before these changes.

A majority of multiethnic countries believe that giving rights to minorities would bring chaos and threaten the unity of nations, including Turkey (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1994). It may seem like the multiethnic societies, with the influence of nationalism, face the challenge of maintaining autonomy; however, recognition of diversity conserves the individual as well as collective identities in multi-ethnic societies.

2.1.2 The Syrian Refugee Situation

History of humankind is abundant in people fleeing from discrimination, oppression, war and those who got displaced seeking immigration to another country. As widely discussed in multicultural circles, receiving education should not be at the expense of losing identity associated with the native language and alienation to one’s mother tongue. Turkey exemplified a nation at the assimilationist end of the dichotomy of assimilationist and pluralistic motives in the integration of refugees with no incorporation of minority students’ home language and culture, evaluation of the issues causing conflict in refugee children’s lives, and encouragement of integration of minority communities to refugee children education (Cummins, 2000). The speakers of languages that are not the nationally or locally accepted are at a disadvantage in education (Ünal-Gezer, 2019). Turkey portrays an extraordinary picture as the host of the highest number of Syrian refugees after the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011. More than 3.5 million Syrian refugees, half of whom are school-aged children, had limited access to a basic human right: Cultural and linguistically inclusive education (Ünal-Gezer, 2019).

Turkey, the next door neighbor, welcomed millions of Syrian refugee children without taking the necessary steps in its education system with teacher education and professional development and setting a multicultural framework for the education system that is fair and welcoming (Ünal-Gezer, 2019). The use of different genres adopting multicultural literature affirms differences and shows cultural and linguistic connections, reveals social issues, and necessitates action against injustice. Inclusive curricular choices that highlight linguistic and cultural diversity facilitate deeper understanding of other cultures, ways of living, and communities. Turkey’s weak educational plan along with its curriculum, instructional materials, and teacher training to provide education in Arabic as the medium of instruction are the aspects failing the education for Syrian refugee children. It is a basic human right of every child to receive the opportunity to develop their first language to the full mastery, to feel proud of it, and to be able to use it for all purposes for every domain (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000).

2.1.3 English as a Foreign Language

McGrew (1992) defined globalization as a “multiplicity of linkages and interconnections between the states and societies which make the modern world system” (p. 23). The worldwide spread of English has strong associations with globalization (Chang, 2006; Tollefson, 1991); therefore, contemporary world countries often modify their curricula for inclusion of English as a lingua franca (Jenkins, 2009; Seidlhofer, 2004). The more the world quickly turns into a global village, with the onset of globalization, the higher the demand becomes on English as the language of the world. Due to the increasing demand on the English language, especially in the non-English-speaking circles, education systems of those countries try their best to cater to those needs. English-medium instruction administered at so many higher education institutions in Turkey has failed to yield effective results according to the Ministry of National Education in Turkey and the Economic Policy Research Foundation’s (TEPAV) survey conducted with 38 universities in 15 cities across Turkey. Due to the failure in English-medium instruction in Turkey, institutions began to look for English-speaking teachers with the necessary qualifications and training to overcome this English language-learning problem of Turkey.

The dominance of English, particularly in non-Anglophone educational contexts, paves the way to its invasion as “English-medium instruction” (EMI) (Macaro et al., 2018), which suggests the use of the target language to teach subjects. The past several decades have been the battlefield over “the potentially socially divisive nature of EMI because instruction through English may limit access from lower socioeconomic groups and/or a fear that the first language or national identity will be undermined” (Dearden & Macaro, 2016, p. 457). In a context where E stands for English, which is the globally acknowledged linguistic platform, the social harmony and the existence of local varieties will be endangered. In the Turkish context, English is highly appreciated as a globally accepted linguistic power causing discontent and insignificance of the local language–Turkish–thus resulting in deterioration of “Turkish language, culture, and identity – Turkishness” (Selvi, 2020, p. 2).

According to Kachru’s (1992) concentric language circles classification, Turkey is an expanding circle country, with English of growing importance but not used on a daily basis by most of the population. Being the most popular of all of the foreign languages, English, was first introduced in Turkey through trading between America and the Ottoman Empire during the 1830s. In 1903, it was introduced as a foreign language at Robert College, which was an American missionary school in Istanbul. English was not taught as a foreign language at state schools until 1908 (Doğançay-Aktuna, 1998).

Kırkgöz (2007) divided the history of English in the Turkish context into three periods: “1. introductory period, 2. 1997 reforms to English language teaching, and 3. EU standards and English language teaching” (p. 217). The previous section explicated the initial period during which English was introduced and became the “sine qua non” for Turkey (Doğançay-Aktuna, 1998). The number of EMI schools, which was 193 (103 private and 90 state-owned) in 1987–1988, increased to 650 for private schools and 415 for Anatolian High Schools (state-governed schools with intensive English-medium instruction) during the 2004–05 academic year.

Until 1997, students were able to take English as a foreign language at Grade 6 (at the age of 12–13) until the end of the penultimate year of high school. The quality of EFL education depended on the availability of English instructors as well as the importance given to foreign language teaching by the school administration. In this system, English was offered three hours per week. Vocabulary and grammar teaching based on rote memorization was the dominating methodology.

During the second phase of English in the Turkish education system (1997–2004), drastic changes in the national English language policy occurred (Kırkgöz, 2007). Innovative, developmental changes were suggested to increase the overall English language education at primary and secondary education systems. For instance, Turkish is not expected to be used in the foreign language classes such as English, French, or German; however, the form-oriented and grammar-based language teaching approaches of Turkish primary education system have been stigmatizing the role of foreign languages as the medium of instruction (Kırkgöz, 2009). After the 2013 Education Reform, EFL is offered as early as Grade 2 with two hours per week to enhance the communicative language competence of Turkish young learners of English (Kırkgöz, 2017). The objectives of English language curriculum are to establish communicative skills with an integration of all four skills in early 2000’s. Two decades after this milestone in the Turkish education system, despite all the efforts put into the improvement of English language instruction in Turkey, Turkey’s English language instruction is lagging behind the needs and realities of the contemporary age.

Kaplan et al. (2012) discussed the urban legends that appeared post-World War II which suggested that English proficiency is a must-have for a strong economic status. Thus, it has been included in the education programs and curricula starting at elementary level in many countries. Turkey has its share of these legends as it started introducing EFL at earlier grades and increased the hours to increase time-on-task; however, proficiency in the foreign language is not comparable to the expectations of the national curriculum (Kırkgöz, 2009). Turkey’s linguistic choices and language planning actions have been summarized in Table 1.

Table 1 Chronological timeline of language policies affecting the statuses of Turkish, English, Kurdish, and Arabic
Full size table

3 The Way Forward

Diverse linguistic contexts have increasingly been welcomed in Turkey, yet as May (2014) cautions, the turn to multilingualism as a movement is often lacking historicity and suffers from ethnocentrism. He claims “mainstream SLA and TESOL can continue to blithely ignore this turn toward multilingualism precisely because it remains corralled within a ‘critical applied linguistics’ with which they seldom engage” (p. 2). The ongoing hegemony of monolingualism rather than an additive bilingual pedagogy for SLA and TESOL predominates in Western contexts, Turkey too. May (2014) continues the discussions on the “the multilingual turn” by analyzing the patterns and tendencies observed in the fields of SLA and TESOL which include textbooks that regard the native speaker as the norm and the treatment of L2 outputs deviating from the native-like as interlanguage. In TESOL, the pedagogical implications of, as Pennycook (1999) puts it, a wider” pedagogy of engagement” that addresses issues of gender, race, class, sexuality are still too often ignored. Reviewing the four-decade long service of TESOL to the field, Canagarajah (2006) asserts: “It is clear that teaching English in a manner that complements rather than competes with local languages and local interests, leading to additive bilingualism, is the new challenge” (p. 25). This is the challenge for Turkey as well.

Skutnabb-Kangas (2019, 0:13) asks “what can TESOL-80-year-old messenger—do to stop crime against humanity?” Teaching and learning English is part of formal education, education that should support children in increasingly different parts of the world to become minimally bilingual, preferably multilingual. If TESOL only supports the English part of this multilingualism, it is a participant in linguistic and cultural genocide. According to UNESCO (2019), around forty percent of the children who attend elementary school in the world are not taught in a language that they understand. This is the situation for Kurdish and Syrian refugee children in Turkey. The language that they often do not understand is English. Educational, linguistic, pedagogical, psychological, sociological, and political science argumentation tells us, however, that if indigenous, tribal, and minority (ITM) children are educated using a dominant language such as English as the main teaching language in a submersion or early exit transition program, this prevents access to education because of the linguistic, pedagogical, and psychological barriers it creates. This violates the human right to education (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2019).

Adding to these problems in Turkey, although the function of native English speakers in ELT has been outstanding, their professional adequacy and readiness has also been questioned because there has been an ideological orientation common among English-medium educational institutions to view native English-speaking teacher candidates as the most ideal regardless of their qualifications, training, and experience (Sarıgül, 2018). Often times, native speakers have been presented in Turkey like elsewhere as if they were the “cherry on top” to attract the interest of families to private schools to increase enrollment (Çelik, 2006). As long as the candidate meets certain criteria of a “foreign teacher” category with a British or American accent and fluency or a foreign look, they can secure the position over a possibly more qualified, experienced, and trained native Turkish counterpart (Tatar, 2011). Over time, the NEST vs NNEST discussions have helped many educators realize that with no necessary training and methodological repertoire, a NEST could do more harm than good to English language learners. The steps taken in Turkey thus far only are only beginning to exterminate the prestige given to NESTs and remove the disregard for the multilingual and multicultural richness of NNESTs.

Turkish language policy and planning efforts need to address these challenges. Decisions must be made whether to view language as a problem, language as a right, or language as a resource (Ruiz, 1984) with attention to time and resource limitations. Linguistic imperialism and the language planning that is monocultural and colonialist must be avoided. We must realize that through teacher education focused on dominant discourses about language-learning and linguistic incapabilities of minority students, language educators often develop the mindset that vernacular varieties are subordinate to the economically favorable counterparts (Ramanathan & Morgan, 2007). Lingua franca varieties where inter and intra-sentential choices enable the language in target to function at global and local levels, localizing English in hybrid forms with local languages, should be accepted. This glocalization can enrich literary texts, movies, and advertisements, making them culturally and linguistically rich and authentic platforms (Ünal-Gezer, 2020). Critical literacy asking critical and thought-provoking questions related to the reader and the society in order to analyze power dynamics and identity construction (Roy, 2017) should be encouraged.

Another dimension of “the way forward” involves consideration of multilayered, complex language-learning processes where the individual is situated at the micro-level with linguistic and motivational capacities. At the meso-level, their social identities such as investment, agency, and power exist in relation to surrounding communities such as families, schools, and neighborhood. Lastly, at the macrolevel, the ideological structures such as cultural values, belief systems are formed through interaction between the language learner and the surrounding communities. Learners as language users continuously interact with stakeholders across these levels. For success in multilingual education that is culturally embracing, these ties need to be considered (The Douglas Fir Group, 2016).

Finally, multicultural education has long been mistaken or intentionally portrayed as “special days/holidays to remember” or “food tasting,” “having written and visual input representing different ethnicities and racial backgrounds.” May (1994), who is skeptical about multicultural education, claims that “multicultural education may be, arguably more benign than its assimilationist and integrationist predecessors but, beyond its well-meaning rhetoric, it is not more effective. It simply continues to perpetuate, in another guise, a system of education which disadvantages minority children” (pp. 35–36). Turkey has goals of indigenous teacher training for Kurdish-speaking and Arabic-speaking Syrian refugee children; while well-meaning, they may not be realistic due to the need for a more intensive language training to develop fluency in these languages for some teachers as well as the need for others to develop pedagogic knowledge and skills to teach these languages effectively. Turkey, with Turkish as the medium of instruction at national level, has attempted to meet the necessities of the globalized world by offering EFL and at the same time embracing its linguistic and cultural nature by accommodating Kurdish and Syrian refugees through language policy and planning, but it has a long way to go.