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Creating a frequency-based Turkish-English Loanword Cognates Word List (TELCWL)
Get PDFThis lexical study aims to establish a frequency-based Turkish-English Loanword Cognates Word List (TELCWL) to assist Turkish English learners’ improvement in English language learning and the corresponding pedagogical practice. A final list of 582 Turkish-English loan-based cognate word pairs was derived from the New General Service List (NGSL) and the Frequency Dictionary of Turkish (FDT). For pedagogical purposes, the TELCWL was divided into five sublists with different features of the cognates in spelling and pronunciation. The coverages of the TELCWL were particularly high in discipline and field-specific corpora on average compared to general service written (5%) and spoken corpora (3.5%), accounting for more than 7%. This result suggests that the TELCWL may be more beneficial for enhancing learners’ reading and writing ability; in addition, not only general Turkish English learners but also learners who need to improve their English language proficiency in specific disciplines can benefit from the TELCWL. Further pedagogical implications are made for English instructors regarding the employment of the TELCWL in English classrooms in Turkey
A telecollaborative approach to foster students' critical thinking skills
Get PDFThis study reports on a telecollaborative approach to foster students' critical thinking skills, more specifically to help them gain knowledge about a different educational culture and develop a critical perspective upon their own educational culture at the university. The study specifically examines the extent to which participation in telecollaboration enabled students to complete a critical thinking task, students' overall impressions of the telecollaboration, and the factors that affected the perceived success of their telecollaborative learning experiences. Undergraduate students taking a Critical Thinking course at a university in Turkey (n=53) telecollaborated with undergraduate students at a university in the USA for three weeks. They were given a critical thinking task, in which students were asked (a) to develop discussion questions that would elicit the information they needed for their arguments from their US partners, (b) to exchange information with their partners, (c) to compare their education with the US education and analyze their education from a critical-thinking perspective, (d) to develop three written arguments based on the telecollaboratively-exchanged information as their final product, and (e) to reflect upon the whole telecollaborative learning process. According to the analysis of their written argument grades and survey responses, telecollaboration provided students with an effective medium to complete the critical thinking task, although some students reported experiencing some problems. Suggestions are offered for better learning experiences in future telecollaborative implementations
An extended literature review on in-service EFL teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs
Get PDFSelf-efficacy (SE) plays an important function for a teacher in boosting teacher-student engagement which may lead to positive outcomes. To investigate the different SE-related concerns among teachers, meta-analysis studies, systemic reviews, and many other sorts of studies in the field of education have been undertaken. In this study, an extended literature review was conducted to particularly investigate the issue of in-service EFL teachers' self-efficacy beliefs. To this end, using terms such as "self-efficacy in general teachers," "self-efficacy in EFL teachers," and "self-efficacy in language teachers," the researcher searched several important databases and found 31 relevant academic journal articles published over the past six years (2015–2021). These papers were derived from the following databases: Elsevier, Taylor & Francis Online, Wiley Online Library, Google Scholar, the JSTOR digital library, Education Source, ERIC (EBSCO), Sage Journal, Cambridge Core, Research Gate, and Research Online. This literature review reveals that research in this field is required to demonstrate how elements in the surroundings of teachers might predict changes in and build teacher self-efficacy beliefs. Additionally, this study is believed to have significant implications in understanding the need for research on self-efficacy via a complex dynamic system theory (CDST) perspective as well as an enhancement in the future of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs
Editorial: Letter from Editors-in-Chief
No full textWe are truly excited to announce that the first issue in 2021 of Focus on ELT Journal brings together six contributions, five of which report valuable insights into the process of teaching and learning. In this issue, we also publish a book review, featuring one of the recently published books in the field.We are happy that our journal is steadily gaining recognition in the field of ELT since we have started receiving a higher number of submissions from different contexts, which simply makes our editorial tasks more challenging. Yet, not only does this help us understand the significance of our efforts in making our journal one of the resourceful and reliable venues for people of academic interest, but also it makes us much more motivated to pursue our goal to be recognized by the specialists in the field. To do this, we ensure that during the manuscript decision processes, we follow stringent publication ethics and rigorous external and internal reviewing cycles with the help of our editorial team and dedicated reviewers. Here, we cordially would like to express our gratitude to our esteemed editorial board members and eleven respected reviewers of this issue as featured above in ‘Reviewers of the current issue’ section
Cross linguistic influence in learning english as a third language: The case of L1 Arabic, L2 Turkish learners and their attitudes towards learning foreign languages
Get PDFThe study aims to reveal the attitudes of the participants (from L1 dominant setting and L2 dominant setting) towards learning foreign languages. After revealing the attitudes of the L3 learners, the study also aims at investigating the source of syntactic and lexical transfer: whether L1 or L2 in their writing assignments. The study also aims at investigating the source of syntactic and lexical transfer: whether L1 or L2 in their writing assignments. A mixed research approach was used in the current study to explore attitudes and origins of the syntactic and lexical transition of L1 Arabic L2 Turkish L3 to English language learners at the Uludağ University School of Foreign Languages. An attitude questionnaire was implemented to get the quantitative data concerning the behavioural, cognitive, and emotional aspects of attitude of the learners towards foreign language learning. In addition to the attitude questionnaire, Think Aloud Protocols (TAPs) was administered in order to make the cognitive process observable. The participants of the current study consist of 23 L3 learners of English. The findings of the quantitative analyses showed statistically significant differences between the two groups attitudes. The students who are living in the dormitories of the university with their friends and using L2 dominantly in their daily lives showed significantly more positive attitudes than the other group. As for the source of transfer, the results showed that the participants displayed some syntactic transfers in their writing productions, but they could not be clearly defined as resulting from Turkish or Arabic because the transferred forms (for example absence of verb to be) were similar in both L1 and L2 of the participants
Book Review: Language Teacher Educator Identity
Get PDFThe notion of professional identity has gained prominence in many professional fields, especially in education with supportive policies of universities around the world. As language teacher educators, we need to better understand the roles we are ascribed to carry the language teacher education a step further. In Barkhuizen’s (2021) book Language Teacher Educator Identity, being language teacher educators in the field of language teaching and learning were examined from varying perspectives. Barkhuizen is currently working as a professor in Applied Language Studies and Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. As a researcher, his areas of expertise consist of language teacher education, teacher identity, study abroad, narrative research in applied linguistics. Along with publishing several books on identity, he was involved in many projects adopting a narrative inquiry approach that he employs in Language Teacher Educator Identity book, as wel
Book Review: Writing for Change: An Advanced ELL Resource
Get PDFIn the following paper, I review the book Writing for Change: An Advanced ELL Resource by Inés Poblet, an Associate Professor at the World Language Department at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington. Poblet is academically interested in sociolinguistics, culturally responsive teaching, the learning experiences of systemically non-dominant learners, the decolonization of English language teaching, code-switching, and code-meshing. Poblet comes from a bilingual background, possessing a Mexican American heritage and having immigrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina (Cascadia Open Education Summit, 2021).
The text is an open-access web-text available in three formats: PDF, Online, and XML. It has been published by Whatcom Community College and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In essence, this allows the reader to both share and distribute the material under certain terms, such as giving appropriating credit (“Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0),” n.d.). This text is hosted by the “Open Textbook Library”, which defines an open textbook “as one that has an open license that makes it free for anyone to use and change” (Open Textbook Library, n.d.). Naturally, this is the case for all the textbooks hosted on the platform, many of which were published only recently.
Editorial: Letter from Editors
No full textDear Focus on ELT Journal Readers,
As we all know, selecting an appropriate publication outlet for scholarly work is a crucial decision. In this context, we believe that Focus on ELT Journal is the right outlet for potential contributions to the field of English Language Teaching since we ensure that contributions meet the target audience at their best form after a rigorous blind peer-review process. We also believe that with every issue, we are getting better recognition and building a reliable and trustworthy name in the field, therefore reminding us of the heavy responsibility to set the quality bar high for the upcoming issues.
We are very happy to announce that the second issue of volume three in 2021 of Focus on ELT Journal includes five contributions, three of which are research articles featuring particular topics in language learning and teaching with different paradigms. This issue also covers two book reviews, recently published, giving comprehensive views about English language learner resources for supporting writing skill and the scope of teacher autonomy. It is noteworthy to state that with this issue, our journal has completed the third year in the field of ELT, which not only makes us excited and motivated for the next issues but also lays a burden on us to go forward and make more efforts contributing to our specific field with more relevant and robust studies
Turkish EFL pre-service and in-service teachers’ views on professional development and related activities
No full textIt is generally agreed that teachers need to develop themselves in order to contribute learners’ personal and professional development. Starting in the final year of faculties of education, teacher candidates get a notion of professional development along with learning about classroom management, pedagogical knowledge and preparing course materials. However, the first time they teach in their own classrooms without any supervisor is the moment when the clock of professional development actually starts to tick. Teaching is a job which requires thinking and learning at the same time. The teacher candidates and teachers who have been performing their duties attempt to find their way of teaching by trial-and-error learning during class and afterwards. Some teachers keep searching for ways to improve and equip themselves outside the classroom as well. As there seems to be no end to professional development, the following study aims to investigate whether there is a difference between pre-service and in-service teachers’ perceptions of the concept. It also tries to find out what methods these two groups use to improve their teaching style and career. To reach this aim, six in-service teachers and six pre-service teachers at a state university were interviewed. It is thought that the findings might reveal a general picture related to in-service and pre-service teachers’ beliefs and perceptions about professional development
Book Review: Developing language teacher autonomy through Action Research
Get PDFAction Research, as a form of teacher research, has gained more ground in English Language Teaching (ELT) contexts in the past several decades. Thanks to authors who have been working on propagating Reflective Practice (RP) and Action Research (AR) consistently for many years now (Burns, 2010; Freeman, 1998; Wallace, 1991) and a number of initiatives run by institutions, such as the British Council (Smith & Rebolledo, 2018), there are now a growing number of publications that are available for teachers, teacher educators and mentors on how to start and sustain classroom research for the benefit of teachers and learners. The dissemination of teacher research reports and accounts has also risen exponentially owing to, among others, the consistent efforts of IATEFL’s Research Special Interest Group (see especially the freely downloadable books published between 2015 and 2020 at http://resig.weebly.com/books.html )