BALKANLARDA YABANCI DİL OLARAK TÜRKÇENİN ÖĞRETİMİ: YUNANİSTAN ÖRNEĞİ

Turkish is one of the most spoken languages in the Balkan countries and Greece is among these countries where Turkish has been taught as a minority language in minority schools in Western Thrace since 1923. Despite the recognition of Hebrew and Armenian at the beginning of the 20th century, only Turkish is recognised as a minority language by the state nowadays. In Greece, Turkish has a special and autonomous position in that it is the mother tongue of the Western Thrace Turkish Minority. The Treaty of Lausanne provides the right to education as an autonomous minority education right and according to the treaty; the Turks of Western Thrace can establish their own schools, in which Turkish was used as the language of instruction along with Greek. However, the teaching of Turkish in schools has been limited to only the Turkish minority schools in Western Thrace. In Greece, there is no general language policy apart from the teaching of official language Greek. The teaching of Turkish was not included by at any stage of compulsory education apart from minority schools and it was 2006 when Greece introduced the teaching of Turkish first time in mainstream majority state schools. An attempt was made to provide other children, mainly Greek, with the opportunity to learn Turkish in compulsory education. By this pilot implementation, which envisaged the teaching of Turkish as a foreign language in some state secondary schools in the Western Thrace region began, albeit on a regional basis. In this study, the teaching of Turkish other than in the Turkish minority schools in Greece, will be discussed. In this context, firstly, the Greek Ministry of Education’s 2006 decree number 61539, which regulates the inclusion of the elective Turkish course in the curriculum to be taught in state schools in the Thrace region of Greece, will be examined. Secondly, the positive and negative aspects of the implementation and the reasons for its regional implementation will be analysed.