Welcoming more than 1.7 million refugee and asylum-seeker children, Turkey has put a considerable effort in turning this tragedy into an advantage for these children in terms of their education. Language teaching has played a remarkable role in this effort. Turkey has offered both Turkish and English language courses to these people. Considering the significance of English as a global language for social integration and future studies, this study attempted to investigate young Syrian refugee students’ attitudes toward English language and their reasons to learn English. Moreover, their perspectives were compared with Turkish young learners. Thirty-eight Turkish and 26 Syrian 5th graders (aged 10–11) voluntarily participated in this study. The findings indicated that learning English makes Syrian students happy, whereas Turkish students enjoy the fun activities in English classes. Learning English is considered both relatively easy and important by both groups. Turkish and Syrian young learners’ reasons to learn English differed slightly. Suggestions were provided for refugee young learners to overcome the potential problems regarding language learning.
Foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) adversely affects learners’ performance in foreign language classes. The related literature focuses on the relationship between FLCA and learners’ achievement or its potential sources. Considering the possibility of students’ having different levels of FLCA in classes, this study was designed to find out whether teaching English songs could decrease FLCA of the students having different levels of anxiety and whether it could increase foreign language examination performance of these learners. The participants consisted of 161 tenth graders. FLCA scale (Horwitz et al., 1986) was administered as a pre-test at the beginning of the study which determined the participating classes as high anxiety (two classes) and low anxiety (two classes). The students in two experimental classes were taught four songs chosen through their votes in four weeks. The results indicated that teaching students’ favourite English songs in regular English classes decreased students’ FLCA regardless of their anxiety level, though higher anxiety group benefited more. Moreover, the results also showed an increase in students’ foreign language examination performance with the use of song teaching due to decreased FLCA.
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