COVID-19 has brought serious challenges to education and many other sectors. Within the educational context, the main difficulties experienced have been reported as challenges related to not only mechanical impediments—such as technology or infrastructure—but also to methodological and personal features, such as lack of motivation or online learning/teaching experiences. The abrupt transition from face-to-face to online education has created the need for some specific abilities, such as digital literacy on the side of the learners at all educational levels. In this context, this mixed-method study aims to determine the digital literacy levels of learners belonging to different school levels and whether age, gender and school degree were significant variables. This study also investigates the technology-related challenges students experienced during COVID-19 pandemic. The sample consisted of 510 participants representing different school levels, age groups, and genders; in addition, a smaller representative group (n = 30) revealed their own evaluations related to their levels of digital literacy and the technology-related challenges they had about online learning. The findings suggest that there is a statistically significant relationship between students’ digital literacy and their gender and school degree, while age was not found to be a statistically significant variable. The qualitative self-reported data suggested that learners have sufficient levels of digital literacy, and that the major technology-related challenges were reported to be lack of the necessary technologies and difficulties in adapting to a new approach to learning.
The purpose of this study is to find out the language assessment literacy (LAL) of teachers who teach English at state elementary, middle, and high schools in Turkey. 101 teachers working in various cities participated in this study. A mixed-methods research design was employed in the study, so the data were collected through both quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (interviews) instruments. The data for the quantitative part of the study were collected by means of the "Teachers Questionnaire" prepared by Vogt & Tsagari (2014) under three domains regarding language testing and assessment (LTA); classroom-focused LTA, purposes of testing and content and concepts of LTA. The data from questionnaires were analyzed via SPSS in terms of means, percentages, and frequencies to find out the training levels and needs of the respondents in language assessment. In the qualitative phase, a total of 18 teachers volunteered to take part in the interviews. The qualitative data that was gathered through semi-structured interviews were analyzed one by one in terms of their similarities and differences, and selective coding was utilized. The overall results from the questionnaires indicated that EFL teachers who work at state high, middle and elementary schools in Turkey perceived their training levels in all three domains of LTA insufficient, and they were also in need of further basic training in those domains. Furthermore, qualitative findings also supported the findings from the questionnaires by also providing insights into the reasons for participants' insufficiency of LAL levels.
Recent studies in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have shown that there is an apparent relationship between teachers' beliefs and their classroom practices of oral corrective feedback in second language teaching. Even though many experimental and classroom studies show that it is beneficial for second language acquisition, relatively little research has explored the relationship between beliefs and practices of teachers in terms of oral corrective feedback. This descriptive study aims to examine the relationship between teachers' stated beliefs and their practices about oral corrective feedback in classrooms in a Turkish EFL setting. The data were collected through classroom observations of ten EFL teachers working at a preparatory language school of a privately funded university in Turkey, semi-structured interviews and scenario-based error correction simulation. The results showed that most of the teachers have an awareness of oral corrective feedback and believe that it is useful for students when provided appropriately to avoid touching learners' affective states negatively. Recasts were observed as the most frequently employed feedback type because of its implicit nature, even though most of the instructors reported elicitation as the most effective corrective feedback strategy. In this respect, the results revealed inconsistencies between teachers' stated beliefs and their actual practices about oral corrective feedback; that is, the types of errors corrected in the classroom also showed deviation from the teachers' stated beliefs.
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