Study/Teach abroad experiences, are shown to impact prospective teachers' beliefs and values, offering exposure to diverse educational systems and teaching philosophies. This qualitative exploratory case study aimed to investigate the impact of the Comenius language assistantship program on the sociolinguistic perspectives and meaning schemes of Turkish pre-service teachers of English, in different intercultural educational contexts in Europe between 2011 and 2014. It incorporated both English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and World Englishes (WE) perspectives. The theoretical framework in the study is Mezirow's (1991) transformative learning theory. The data, collected via semi-structured interviews and reflective journals, were analyzed via content analysis. The findings indicated that although their social and educational backgrounds affected their interpretations of international teaching experiences, participants seemed to share an overarching sociolinguistic perspective. Changes emerged in four meaning schemes: inclusive pedagogical practices, teaching and learning English from the ELF-and WE-aware perspectives, creative and critical thinking activities, as well as intercultural awareness. The study underscored the necessity of integrating the following issues into pre-service language teacher education programs: intercultural awareness, competence, and communication, as well as linguistic and cultural diversity. The findings also emphasized the teacher educators' role as facilitators in terms of enhancing the transformative potential of the international teaching experiences.
This study investigates the types of citation transformation preferred by both English L1 (native language) writers and Turkish writers who use English as a foreign language (L2). The corpus consists of 34 theses, 17 of which are Turkish writers' theses in English language including 10 M.A. and 7 PhD theses and 17 English L1 writers' theses comprised of 10 M.A. and 7 PhD theses. Based on the relevant literature, a rubric was prepared by the researchers in order to analyse the theses by means of qualitative content analysis. The findings revealed that three forms of content integration consisting of direct quotation, patchwriting and critical evaluation were markedly different in English L1 and Turkish writers' theses. Turkish L1 writers' overuse of direct quotation and patchwriting attracted attention compared to English L1 writers.
Given that it is challenging for EFL teachers to create an input-rich learning environment with ample learning and practice/production opportunities, the integration of online resources into language classes has gained importance recently. Although the effective use of technology in educational settings is viewed as a 21st century skill, the issue of providing EFL learners with systematic training in the use of online search techniques in educational settings has not been explored sufficiently and many learners are not yet aware of how to utilize technological resources for educational purposes. Hence, this chapter aims to investigate how EFL majors in an English preparatory program at a public state university in the west of Turkey use Google searching skills receptively and productively in pedagogical tasks, to highlight how Google search tasks can be used to raise language awareness and to offer suggestions for effective integration of search techniques into teaching EFL at the tertiary level.
Blogs are an integral component of blended learning environments in English as a second language (ESL)/English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. Although they are used in higher education to promote language learning, their impact on EFL preservice teachers' writer identity development in academic writing is underexplored. Utilizing Hyland's metadiscourse model, this qualitative case study in the Turkish higher education context investigated EFL preservice teachers' writer identity development on blogs. The data were collected via reflective journals, semi-structured interviews and reflective essays. Triangulation and corpus-based analysis of Hyland's metadiscourse markers were used in the data analysis. The findings revealed the EFL preservice teachers' multifaceted and even contradictory academic writer identities on blogs and numerous challenges they encountered regarding their identity displays. This study highlighted a blended and corpus-based futuristic perspective on the exploration of EFL writer identities.
With a variety of changes taking place in the role of learners and teachers in the 21st century, learners are expected to be active participants in the learning process through interaction and collaboration, while teachers act as facilitators, creating learning opportunities for the former and monitoring the learning process. This chapter aims to highlight perceptions of Turkish pre-service teachers' of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) concerning a wiki project in a freshman contextual grammar course. Considering the limited research on wiki use in the Turkish teacher education context, this mixed method case study aimed to explore perceptions of pre-service English teachers' wiki learning experiences and investigate their critical appraisal of the project at a state university. The results indicated mainly favourable perceptions, pointing out the enhanced impact of wikis on group dynamics, pre-service EFL teachers' learning process, their creativity and autonomy, while revealing varying degrees of level of and satisfaction with collaborative work, and technical aspects.
Action research has shown that using the Flipped classroom method, students become more active and engaged in educational activities. The Flipped classroom method, used in the activity study, revealed that students were more successful in communicating and cooperating, the process could be made easier by differentiating, playing, including intercultural aspects. This method made it possible to develop higher thinking abilities and increased motivation, and involvement in the educational process was observed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.