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This study seeks to understand how university supervisors and cooperating teachers approach giving feedback during the practice teaching experience to preservice English language teachers and the nature of feedback they give through post-lesson conferences and written evaluations. The data for the study come from field notes of classroom observations, post-lesson conferences between student teachers and university supervisors, and student teachers and cooperating teachers, written evaluation sheets and documents. The findings indicated that the university supervisors encouraged reflection during their post-lesson conferences and helped the student teachers to evaluate their lessons more critically. The cooperating teachers' feedback was found to be more situation specific by focusing on certain instances about the classroom. This study also discussed different modes of giving feedback (oral feedback through post-lesson conferences and written feedback through evaluation sheets) to teacher candidates during practice teaching. Finally, this study makes suggestions for the supervisors and cooperating teachers about providing constructive feedback for the student teachers during practice teaching.

This is an overview of research on applied linguistics and foreign language education in Turkey, surveying nearly 130 studies from the period 2005–2009. Following a brief presentation of the history and current sociopolitical situation of foreign language education in Turkey, the article focuses on research that characterizes the most common interests of academics and practitioners in the following areas: foreign language teaching and teachers, foreign language learning and learners, foreign language teacher education, the four language skills, measurement and evaluation, and the relationship between language and culture. Our discussion of each area is based on information extracted from local professional journals, conference proceedings and papers and Ph.D. dissertations. The studies examined reveal that, in general, practical concerns assume priority over theoretical issues, a substantial proportion of research being conducted on EFL learning and teaching.

This article explores four Turkish students’perceptions of participation in graduate courses at a U.S. university. Data were collected during one academic semester through in-depth interviews, a focus group interview, classroom observations, and collection of relevant documents. The findings suggest that the participants’ classroom participation experiences were influenced by multiple factors, the major ones being educational factors (e.g., cultural background), environmental factors (e.g., discussion topic), and influence of classroom dynamics (e.g., peer dominance in discussion). These factors, moreover, were intricately interrelated in ways that led to different classroom environments that may be described using a continuum from the most anxiety provoking to the most facilitative.

This paper presents a study on the employment criteria used by school administrators and their views on the strengths and weaknesses of local teachers and expatriate teachers. This study aimed to provide a perspective on the issue from an English as a foreign language context. Questionnaires collected from administrators of 94 private primary and high schools in Istanbul were analyzed. Although being a native speaker of English ranked seventh out of the eight criteria, the presence of expatriate teachers in a school was considered important. In addition, participants from schools that employed both expatriate and local teachers attributed more importance to the native-speakerness criterion. Finally, administrators found local teachers more knowledgeable in teaching methods, whereas expatriate teachers were perceived as better in language use.