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On Turkish-English Bilingual Books
by Vacide Cündoğlu

My name is Vacide Cündoğlu and I am a doctorate student at University of Houston in Second Language Education Program. I came to United States from Ankara, Turkey in 2001 to pursue master’s in the same area. My ambition is to learn how to teach English more effectively where English is taught as a foreign language such as Turkey. But would you believe if I say that English was one of my worst subjects in elementary school?

I was not interested in it as I did not see the value. My parents who have been both well educated in the English language were very upset about this situation. My father particularly who usually never paid attention to my education was worried about my failure and told me that he would buy me a bunch of banana or a bar of my favorite chocolate Damak every time I got an A from my weekly quizzes. This kind of bribery worked well for a while but I still wasn’t very interested in English.

So, on my 9th birthday my parents gave me a very special gift. It was a set of Turkish / English bilingual classical children’s books. There were 10 books and in each of them there were three stories. Some of them were common ones such as Cinderella, Puss 'N Boots or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The others were unknown to me such as The City of No Return or Magic City. Each of them was a hard cover book printed on high quality paper with wonderful lively illustrations. In each page the story was told in Turkish and English. At the end of the book there was a little glossary for unfamiliar words. I was totally attached to the books because in my time in Turkey such books were almost non-existent and my parents must have paid quite a bit of money for those books. I started reading them immediately but guess which language I was reading? Of course Turkish because it was my native language. The English text was so hard for me. As a third grade student the most I was able to say were sentences like “I am going to Ankara”, “where do you come from?” How was I supposed to understand “Once upon a time there lived a princess in a far land whose mother had died”. Every time my parents asked, I’d say “Yes, don’t worry, I’m reading the English, not the Turkish text. Don’t worry” which was quite a lie!

However; as my English improved within the coming years, my understanding of the English text improved as well. Especially, I learned lots of new vocabulary from those stories. However as educators and parents we need to be careful when giving bilingual books to children and make sure that both languages match the child’s language level as much as possible. An example is a series of books called Elmer written by David McKee and translated by Fatih Erdoğan. In Elmer, both texts are written for the language level of very young children with just one sentence per page. This is a better solution of writing bilingual books.