Learning the Turkish Culture and its Language through an Online Cooking Game

Abstract

When learning a foreign language, the target language's culture should also be understood to access the foreign community better. However, traveling to another country is not an option for everyone. Therefore, an online game enables one to study foreign languages and cultures at every place and at every time within a playful environment. This paper goal is to determine if it is possible for the Swiss to simultaneously learn the Turkish language and the country’s cooking recipes within an online game to have a deeper cultural understanding. There are studies in the field of combining language and cultural learning within a game for Chinese and Japanese languages. However, there are no studies on the Turkish language which include the relevance of food as a cultural aspect. Therefore, this paper developed a prototype cooking game on the platform Moodle that combines learning Turkish vocabulary and the Turkish culture while recooking a regional recipe. The prototype was tested by thirteen Swiss living in Switzerland's German-speaking region. They all have no or very few experience with speaking the Turkish language but are interested in learning the language as well as the culture. Furthermore, all participants have a relationship with Turks or Turkey in their private environments. The outcome showed that learning the Turkish language and culture within a cooking game is possible. Although the game included different learning techniques, matching exercises are the most suitable for a cooking game. In addition, many participants stated that they would like to have pronunciation exercises which is also the type of exercise this paper suggests for future studies.