This presentation focuses on methods and materials used in teaching intermediate Ottoman Turkish at a higher education institution in the United States. The presentation will explore the challenges and opportunities of working with learners from diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds. Students with a basic knowledge of the Perso-Arabic alphabet and modern Turkish language are often placed in an intermediate Ottoman Turkish classroom. A classroom of learners from diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds presents an opportunity to teach the Ottoman language with more advanced texts and collaborative learning activities. Such a group of learners joining together in an intermediate-level class also presents challenges that require learners to fill in their knowledge gaps in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. This filling in the knowledge gaps resembles reading a text in medias res or in the middle of the plot. In literary texts that begin in medias res, the plot is exposed with flashbacks to previous events. This method of using learners’ prior experience helps students learn the unique characteristics of Ottoman Turkish vocabulary, grammar, and orthography using a comparative approach. The presenter will explain this teaching methodology with examples from classroom activities used in an intermediate-level Ottoman Turkish class. The presenter will also discuss appropriate primary resources for intermediate to advanced Ottoman. It is hoped that this presentation will contribute to the discussions on creating a curriculum for teaching the Ottoman Turkish language.

Ottoman Turkish has been accepted to be a dead language which is preserved today in a rich archive of literary texts and documents. Its education is limited to grammar instruction, transcription and translation into Modern Turkish and in situ reading practices from original or redacted texts. This paper proposes poetry recitation, and writing in and translation into Ottoman Turkish as two pedagogical methods that will have students actively engage in the language. Ottoman Turkish poetry uses the syntactic possibilities of Turkish language to an extreme level as it present mythological and historical references. It has been taught throughout centuries as a mnemonic device to teach high register of the language. Reading, analyzing and reciting Ottoman Turkish poetry not only provide students knowledge intellectual and mythological world view of Ottoman governing elite and basic set of vocabulary that is functional across literary and archival texts, but it also helps them develop a sense of sentence compositions in Ottoman Turkish written language. Writing in and translation into Ottoman Turkish exercises, on the other hand, encourages students to think creatively about the language. Students can write about any topic using original passages as models. Meanwhile, translating short passages from other languages develop vocabulary and usage as it activates the passive reading knowledge raising competence in the language. Drawing on prior experience with these two methods in a language program, "Old Language Young Again" opens them to discussion in order to find creative ways to teach so-called dead or old languages.

The increased interest in Ottoman studies across various fields in the last decade resulted in a rise in the number of North American universities offering Ottoman Turkish language courses and development of online Ottoman Turkish dictionaries, word solvers, and various digital humanities projects. In this presentation I will focus on challenges in Ottoman Turkish classrooms posed by both of these developments. In the first part of the presentation I will describe how the willingness of the universities to offer Ottoman Turkish in their programs yet their lack of commitment in long term planning for instruction create problems for instructors and students alike, and what strategies and planning we come to rely on to help students advance their Ottoman Turkish. In the second part of the presentation I will discuss the teaching methods, print and digital sources that I have come to trust to equip students with better understanding of Ottoman grammar and orthography.

In this presentation, I hope to share my years-long experiences of teaching differentlevels of Ottoman Turkish and organizing an advanced intensive summer school onOttoman language and paleography. As the field of Ottoman studies continued togrow in the early 2000s, especially in the North American universities, and theOttoman archives and manuscript libraries became relatively more accessible toresearchers, the number of students wanting to master the language increasedconsiderably. Unfortunately, many universities are still reluctant to add an instructor to teach Ottoman exclusively. Instead, students are scrambling to make up by attending summer courses. But is this a viable method? I will offer my observations about the curricula, student profiles, challenges of teaching and learning the Ottoman Turkish language.