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Content-based instruction (CBI) challenges in Turkey: Voices of high school students
Get PDFCBI is gaining popularity all over the world and in Turkey. The findings of the current study have shown that language and content integration provide high school students with a clear and relevant learning background. When language is a key to substantive interactions, events have real intent and involve a sincere exchange of meaning. The current study is mixed-method research with the participants from high schools in Turkey. The themed learning helps students to strengthen their reading and writing skills as they can create schemes during the course and can adapt existing schemes to new learning situations
Non Critical Analysis of EFL Classroom Discourse in a Speaking Course through Bower’s model
Get PDFThis is a descriptive qualitative study of speaking classroom discourse. This study aims to discuss an authentic spoken discourse of an EFL class by employing Bowers’ model (1980) to determine which teaching functions enhance the communication opportunities for students. In this article, the concept of Bower’s model is first discussed and how it is of a vital significance to classroom interaction in an EFL class and the efficiency and effectiveness of the various patterns of discourse. In this article, the distribution of teacher-talk and student-talk is investigated and who has a higher degree of control over the discourse in the class is highlighted. It also examines the structure of interactions and how the teacher manages the conversation and turn-taking. The article includes how teachers understand their language affects the role in the classroom as well as how learners are aware of when and where they have to engage in the speaking process. In addition, the article also investigates the functions in a speaking class and how different teacher acts are used in urging learners to participate in classroom discussion. The last section is a conclusion to summarize the main ideas discussed in the article
Test Anxiety in the Foreign Language Learning Context: A Theoretical Framework
Get PDFWhile test anxiety is a strong predictor that affects the achievement and proficiency in the foreign language learning process, how it relates to the current theories and hypotheses remains an unanswered question. In addition, while test anxiety within the scope of descriptive and correlational studies is an issue that has attracted researchers, its theoretical background is mostly ignored. Thus, this paper aims to present a theoretical framework of test anxiety in the foreign language learning context. For this purpose, the paper first introduces the terms, definitions, concepts, theories, and hypotheses in relation to test anxiety. Then, the paper focuses on foreign language anxiety. Finally, it presents a theoretical background for test anxiety in a narrower scope. The paper concludes that more research is warranted, whereas teachers need to be trained to moderate the effects of test anxiety among foreign language learners
The Effects of Reflective Teaching Techniques on Teachers’ Self-Evaluation for Further Lessons: Analysis through Diary Keeping
Get PDFThis study aims to reveal the attitudes and beliefs of English teachers about reflective teaching by using a technique called diary keeping. It also focuses on the effects of keeping diaries on teachers’ self-reflection and tries to bring the contributions it can provide teachers’ reflective teaching skills into the results of this study. It has been presumed that teachers will benefit the most in this process with this technique that allows them to look at their own practices closely through an introspective, mirror-like experience. For this study, the data were collected from four English teachers. Diaries were used as the instrument of this study. Pre-diary questions were also asked teachers to identify the level of awareness on the topic. The data were analyzed qualitatively by using content analysis. It is found out that teachers have used this technique both as a source and as a tool. They have used it as a source of awareness, self-evaluation, and preparation for further lessons and as a tool to analyze student needs, detect the same types of activities and uncover the problems. As a result of this study, diaries have been suggested for further educational practices and current English teachers as they lead one of the best ways the teachers can be reflective, give themselves effective feedback and advance their teaching skills
English as a lingua franca: From classroom to out-of-class communication
Get PDFThis case study explores the perceived contributions and impacts of out-of-class ELF-oriented practices on EFL learners’ perspectives for EFL communication. 22 Turkish EFL learners studying at a state university participated to the study and each of them were asked to engage in communication with a large number of international and exchange students from different culture and language contexts on campus. At the onset of the process, Turkish learners were informed about the written and spoken genres of the out-of-class communication (including business meetings, job interviews, academic reports, resumes etc.) incorporated into an oral communication skill course in 14 weeks. Immediately after each ELF communication, that is the out-of-class communication activity completed with the native speakers or non-native speakers of English, they kept their weekly records and wrote self-reflections. The collected data were analyzed by following the steps of coding method (Merriam, 1998). Findings suggest that ELF-oriented practices out-of-class communication raised EFL learners’ awareness and perceptions towards cultural and linguistic diversities. Also, EFL learners appeared to show new insights on intelligibility in communication and willingness to employ communication strategies such as negotiation for meaning, use of non-verbal communication, in order to enhance their intercultural communicative competence
How to handle with EFL learners’ negative attitudes towards speaking English
No full textThis study mainly investigates young adults’ negative attitudes towards foreign language learning with its underlying reasons by developing an action plan to minimize them in a Turkish EFL context. Lower intermediate students (n=35) of Vocational High School at a state university in Turkey participated in the study. The data required to initiate an action research cycle were collected through in-class observations, and then, randomly selected participants (n=8) were interviewed in order to get in-depth data. The qualitative data were analyzed via content analysis. The analysis of the data showed that adults’ language learning behaviors were not only influenced by their previous learning experiences but also their lack of knowledge in their L1 and L2. The data collected through action research also revealed that students’ negative attitudes might also result from the attitudes of their teachers towards them. In terms of the detected problems owing to the class observation, the present study might be regarded as context-specific since the solutions for speaking anxiety were generated with respect to its own contexts, aspects, variables and effects on learners
Suggested Syllabus for World Englishes and Culture Elective Course at ELT Departments
Get PDFThe Council of Higher Education (CoHE) has transformed the curriculum for teaching departments into a phase during which more elective courses are taught in recent years. In accordance with this, the related innovation led to the constitution of three essential elective categories named as professional teaching knowledge (PTK), subject area knowledge (SAK) and general knowledge (GK). This research study aimed to investigate and suggest the integration of World Englishes (WE) and Culture course into English Language Teaching undergraduate programme. This study initially targeted to investigate teacher trainers’ views on the most avail contents to encapsulate within the WE and Culture course. Subsequent to this aim, the study aimed to constitute a syllabus for this course. With this notion, a study which incorporated two distinct stages was generated. The study followed a mixed method sequential exploratory research design. Correspondingly, documents which embrace books, university syllabi, google search documents and research articles were analyzed. Following this execution, a survey was constituted and conducted on teacher trainers. Microsoft Excel was utilized with the aim of analyzing the documents and SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 21.0 was employed for the analysis of the quantitative findings. Results of the study demonstrated that there were 34 essential topics which were drawn from the document analysis phase of the study and teacher trainers favored some of these topics more than the others. A syllabus for “World Englishes and Culture” course was suggested at the end of the study
The linguistic dimension of L2 interviews: A multidimensional analysis of native speaker language
Get PDFThis research profiles the L2 interviews from a variationist perspective by using native speaker data in order to gain insight into the characteristics of three different speaking tasks in the framework of the LINDSEI learner language corpus tradition: Personal Narrative Component, an Interaction Component and a Picture Description. This way, we set out to research one area of the assessment of proficiency that is usually neglected: that of the linguistic nature of the tasks used to assess general “proficiency” in a given language. Our corpus was part-of-speech (POS) tagged and analysed using Multidimensional Analysis (MDA). We found that the different speaking tasks determine the range of linguistic features that are more likely to be generated by the communicative potential of the task itself. This profiling is of interest in areas such as language assessment, where the interview is widely used to evaluate the speakers’ communicative competence, but also in the field of learner language research. Our research is an example of the possibilities which combined methodologies of learner language analysis can offer to both the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research community and the more general applied linguistics research field