Turkey Two - Text
I am a 25 year old Turkish male. My father is a doctor and my mother is an English teacher, and they are both Turkish. I have graduated from a university and have my bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. Currently I am studying master’s degree which I started last semester.
I was born and raised in Turkey. I have been in the US for about one year. I went to high school at Shawnee Heights High School which is in Topeka, KS. I first started learning English at elementary school. I always had an enthusiasm and a great willingness to properly learn English and to speak it fluently. My stay in the US probably had a tremendous effect on developing my English skills.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I was born in November 10, 1982 in Mersin which is a coastal city in Turkey. It gets very hot in Mersin, especially in summer; you can't stand to walk in the streets. But I lived most of life in Erzurum which is a small and nice city at the very east of Turkey. It has a strong cold climate. Once it snows, it won't go away, and you would see the snow for like 7 months during the whole year...In Turkey, you would come across different climates in different regions which makes it a really interesting country. I studied elementary, middle school and high school in Erzurum. And when I was in high school, I participated at a foreign exchange student program. I went to high school in…I went to high school for one year in Topeka, Kansas... I had a very different experience during my stay in the States. I had…I was exposed to the American culture, had learnt lots of new things, improved my English, so on...In Turkey the English language is given a lot of importance. They start to learn English from…from very young ages. I for instance started learning English since elementary school. But we just basically repeated the same subjects until high school. And…and in high school it was just a bit more advanced. Actually learning English for Turkish people is very difficult, because it's a…it’s a different language altogether…When I went back to Turkey, I took the university exam and moved to Istanbul to study university. And I'm currently studying master's degree in civil engineering in this city. Istanbul is the largest city in Turkey. And it's also the best known city in Turkey for foreigners. The second largest one is Ankara which is at the same time the capital city. Turkey’s not very well known country for most people. But it’s one of the European countries. It has the largest area…That’s all.
SAMPLE RECORDED, SPEECH TRANSCRIBED, AND NOTES WRITTEN BY THE SUBJECT HIMSELF, WHO SUBMITTED THE SAMPLE April 4, 2008
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