Eduardo González
The Instituto Cervantes is going to promote the teaching of the Spanish language and culture in Turkey by opening an extension in Ankara, the capital of the country, where it already has a center in the city of Istanbul.
The agreement to create such an extension – which was approved last Tuesday by the Institute’s board of directors – will be one of the main topics of the working trip that the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, will make to Turkey from October 11 to 13.
The Institute’s new extension in Ankara, which will be attached to Cervantes Istanbul, will be located at Baskent University, a renowned private institution created in 1994. Its classrooms on the Bağlica Campus will host Spanish classes, workshops and seminars starting next January. Somewhat later, Spanish teacher and examiner training programs will be offered. Exams for the official DELE Spanish diplomas will also be held and administered.
The director of Cervantes Istanbul, Fernando Martínez-Vara de Rey de Irezábal, and the president of Baskent University, Haldun Müderrisoğlu, will sign the agreement next Friday, October 13, in the presence of Luis García Montero and the Spanish ambassador, Javier Hergueta Garnica. The event will take place at the Spanish ambassador’s summer residence in Büyükdere.
Thanks to the new extension in Ankara, the Instituto Cervantes will complement the teaching and cultural activities it carries out in the center of Istanbul and will strengthen its presence and influence in the Republic of Turkey. Since it opened in September 2001, the Instituto Cervantes in Istanbul has seen a remarkable growth in its teaching activity: the number of annual registrations to learn Spanish has doubled from 1,803 to over 3,500.
Ankara, with a population of close to six million inhabitants, is home to more than twenty embassies of Latin American countries, which will make it easier to host the numerous cultural activities (conferences, exhibitions, book presentations, etc.) organized by the Cervantes Institute in Istanbul, which can now also be held in the country’s political capital.
Spanish is the second foreign language of greatest interest to students in Turkey and has established itself as the third language for adults, behind English and German. Spanish is taught in the vast majority of private schools in the country, where it has become the second most important foreign language after English. It is less present in public schools, as it is not yet included in the academic programs of the Turkish Ministry of Education.
Among the reasons for the interest in learning Spanish is the large number of Spanish speakers (almost 500 million native speakers worldwide), even in the United States, or various socio-cultural factors such as soccer, music in Spanish, gastronomy or cinema and television series in our language.
The University of Baskent, which will host the new extension, has more than 1,700 teachers and 17,000 students per year, who study both technical-scientific disciplines and arts and humanities in its extensive facilities. It has twelve faculties, a music conservatory, eight institutes, a foreign language school and 22 research centers.
