Egitim Fakültesi

During his rule, Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) had to recover as a financially, militarily, and politically sick of European man. After losing vast Christian territories in the Balkans he also had to initiate Pan-Islamic politics to protect unity and cope with European driven liberalist movements among the Arabs. Knowing that education is the most important factor in development and community enlightenment, Sultan Abdulhamid II attempted to reform and expand the Ottoman educational system by establishing several educational institutions for various purposes during his reign. Among them, the «Royal School for Tribes», established in 1892 in Istanbul, is distinguished from others with its aims and students.

In 2012 Ministry of National Education in Turkey has revised the education system so that the new 4+4+4 system requires a three-tier model of education with primary, secondary, and high school components. As with many changes in the curriculum, foreign language (FL) teaching has also been changed and the starting age for learning a FL has been lowered to 6.6 years of age (second grade). As one of the parties of the education process, teachers’ views about this curriculum change and their understanding of teaching English to young learners (TEYL) have great importance. The current research aims to investigate English teachers’ ideas towards the starting age for FL learning, how it should be conducted with young learners, and finally what their current practices are when teaching children. The data for the study is gathered from 203 primary school English teachers from seven different regions of Turkey via a questionnaire consisting of three parts concerning the aforementioned issues. The first part has closed and open-ended questions and aims at finding teachers views about the starting age/grade for language learning. Second part investigates teachers’ beliefs about TEYL and third part investigates teachers’ classroom implementations while teaching YLs. The reliability is taken for each part of the questionnaire. As a result, all sections of the questionnaire are found reliable with alpha values .758, .796, and .806 consecutively. Frequency analysis, Wilcoxon signed rank test, and ANOVA were used to make the analysis. The results indicate that teachers prefer language education to start at the first stage of primary school and even earlier during pre-school. Pertaining to teacher’s beliefs about TEYL, most of the teachers revealed that FL teaching in primary school should be mainly based on listening and speaking rather than grammar; within a context through visual/kinesthetic activities, songs, and games rather than worksheets. However, the Wilcoxon signed rank test results revealed that there are significant differences between the participants’ beliefs and their implementation. Consequently, teachers are in favor of the recent changes in the curriculum; however, some teachers might need some in-service training regarding the use of appropriate techniques with YLs. These in-service training courses should involve practical tips to implement theoretically sound language teaching to children. Contribution and understanding of teachers, parents, and other educational institutions/organizations should be supported for a successful implementation of a language policy.

The present study aims at investigating awareness of cooperating
teachers (CTs) about their role during the practicum, which is carried out
in the fourth year of teacher education programs in Turkey. The process has
three dimensions: the trainees, the teacher trainers at the university, and
the cooperating teachers at the practice school. In addition to their
awareness about their roles, the current study investigates cooperating
teachers‟ ideas about their involvement in the training process, and their
cooperation with the teacher trainer. Data for the research was collected
by a questionnaire and gathered from 72 cooperating teachers, in 38
practice schools. The results suggest that CTs have limited awareness on
their roles during practicum. In addition, there is a considerable mismatch
between how CT‟s view their contribution to the process and how much they
actually contribute and also, there is disparity between their ideas about
cooperation with the trainers and how much they actually cooperate with
them.