Cross-Cultural Common Elements in Foreign Language Teaching: Turkish Teaching Activities of Yunus Emre Institute in South Korea

Success in language teaching depends on the coordinated realization of various elements. The grammatical and pronunciation structures (differences) of the language, the educational level, goal and motivation of the language learner, the methods and places where the language is learned, the institutions that provide language learning, teachers, curricula, experts who prepare language teaching books, cultural stakeholders of the language are among the noteworthy stakeholders of the process. Foreign language teachers increasingly point to the importance of culturolinguistic studies. In this article, South Korea is chosen as a reflection of the teaching of Turkish, a language whose learning rate has been increasing in recent years in distant geographies. The research design focuses on the determination of common cultural elements in Turkish and Korean languages in the context of the language-culture relationship and the extent to which this culturolinguistic method is reflected in the activities of Yunus Emre Institute, the "official language teaching institution" of Turkey, in Seoul. The main problem is: to what extent is source-target culture transfer provided in language teaching activities, and to what extent are shared cultural elements included in the process? Using the method of document analysis, the article argues that both target culture transfer and activities involving shared cultural elements will create new opportunities in language teaching for foreigners in the world and offer various suggestions in this context.