In spite of the increased emphasis since being designated by the United States National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) as one of the sixteen critical languages, the number of students studying Turkish at the university level is small (MLA, 2015). During implementation of this project, several problems unique to Turkish arose. According to the Defense Language Institute (DLI), the degree of difficulty for English language speakers to learn Turkish is greater than that of most European languages because of the vast cultural differences between the United States and Turkey. There is one commonly used textbook at the university level across the United States (Öztopçu) which succeeds in delivering the teaching materials suitable for a traditional classroom but fails to provide opportunities for students to develop cultural and communicative competence. Additionally, it fails to offer digital technology, such as online study materials, which many students would prefer to have included in their academic studies (ECAR, 2014). The Turkish Global Simulation (TGS) project offers a solution: the development of effective teaching materials that would provide students access to the Turkish language and culture using the latest technologies that students already use and enjoy. The TGS was based on the French Apartment Building (Dupuy, 2006a, 2006b), which exemplifies relevant task-based instruction. The French Apartment Building project helps students attain communicative competence and cultural literacy through books and web resources, and focuses on improving students' reading and writing skills. The TGS allows students to experience a virtual life as a tenant in an apartment building in Istanbul. This is accomplished with the use of web applications (Facebook, Google Earth, Google Docs, Google Voice, emails, Blogger, chats, text messages, podcasting, audio-video files, 3-D maps, and Google Bookmarks), and authentic materials (e.g. movie/music clips). I delivered the tasks and the materials—in accordance with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) standards—through the TGS project, which was first piloted and run successfully for several years to teach second-year second-semester university Turkish learners. The project involves a semester-long simulated life in a Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) environment, and promotes cultural and communicative competence while motivating students to be virtually connected to a new culture, autonomous, and lifelong learners. The specific research questions address: 1. How does the TGS project affect student’s cultural competence? 2. How effective is the TGS project as a context for language learning? 3. How do students compare the TGS with more traditional learning methods? How do teachers evaluate the Turkish textbook? 4. How effective is Internet technology in the TGS project? A number of different instruments were used to measure the effectiveness of global simulation in promoting cultural competence: oral interviews, ACTFL standards textbook evaluations, Flashlight surveys, teacher-course evaluations, and the TGS final exams. The results revealed that the success of global simulation in Turkish has clear implications for teaching not only Turkish, but also other less commonly taught languages, for which the classroom is the predominant method for American university students to learn a foreign language and culture.

The culture demonstrates itself in the shared values, attitudes, beliefs, norms and behaviours of people and it is distinguished from each other by differences in those shared meanings of people interacting. As culture is varied across countries, leadership styles are also varied across countries and are not exercised in the same way across different cultures. They are imported in accordance with the cultural environment in which they are perceived. Therefore, understanding the culture is significant in order to explain preferences of leaders concerning leadership styles. The main purpose of the present dissertation is to provide an overview of the relationship between Turkish culture and the way in which leadership is exercised by Turkish female leaders. The present study is completed in three steps in order to demonstrate that the existing relationship between the Turkish culture and leadership styles of female leaders in Turkey. In the first step, the study examined what culture is, what dimensions of the national culture are, what leadership is and how leadership styles are culturally-linked. In the second step, the paper investigated how female leaders perceive and exercise different leadership styles across different cultures. In the third step, the study researched what cornerstones of Turkish culture and how anticipated leadership styles of Turkish female leaders are shaped by Turkish culture.     The study followed a qualitative research approach based on the grounded theory. Ten female leaders coming from different backgrounds were interviewed in order to draw a holistic picture of the relationship between Turkish cultural values and leadership styles of Turkish female leaders. The findings of the study indicate that the Turkish culture has an influence on leadership styles of Turkish female leaders. According to the results, while Islamic values have no significant impact on leadership behaviours of female leaders, such cultural attributes as collectivism, high power distance, uncertainty avoidance and paternalism have a huge impact on leadership styles of Turkish female leaders.       The research examined only leadership styles of Turkish female leaders. Therefore, this study recommends a future research which will investigate leadership styles of Turkish males in order to understand whether gender has also an effect on leadership styles of Turkish leaders.