I have been
working on my bachelor paper with two colleagues for five months
from September 2011 to January 2012. It is about the implementation of
Communicative Language Teaching in Turkish schools. It has been handed in as a
thesis paper completing the necessities of graduating from ELT department, in
Mersin University in 2012. All rights are reserved by Gamze Cokluk, Ferhat Kurt
and Ugur Aslan.
Now, the
educational system in Turkey has changed a lot after the regulations in 2012, but it will
be the focus of another entry. Here, i'll post the abstract first! Later, i'll
go on publishing my paper! If you are interested in reading the whole paper,
please contact me by commenting or sending an e-mail to
"aslanugur01@gmail.com"
Learners’
Perceptions and Attitudes toward Communicative Language Teaching
in
Turkish EFL Contexts
Abstract
Communicative Language Teaching was introduced to
Turkish education system in 1997 and since then it has been highly appreciated
by curriculum makers as well as language teachers. However, there occur constraints in
implementation of CLT in Turkish EFL settings even though the new Turkish EFL
curriculum adopts a communicative approach to language teaching. The present study is motivated by the review
of previous literature revealing that although there are many studies dealing
with teachers’ perceptions and attitudes toward CLT, few studies focused on the
learners’ perceptions and attitudes toward communication-based
instruction. Consequently, the purpose
of the present study is to find out a group of EFL learners’ perceptions and
attitudes toward CLT in terms of instructional focus.
The present study is conducted in ELT department of
Mersin University with 148 preparatory and freshman students. A Likert-type questionnaire, which was
originally developed by Savignon and Wang (2003), was adopted and administered
to collect data. Data gathered by means
of questionnaires were analyzed descriptively.
The findings of the study suggest a mismatch between learners’ classroom
practices and their preferences in terms of instructional focus. Most of the learners expressed that their
high school EFL practices were mainly grammar-focused and they reported highly
negative attitudes toward these practices.
The discrepancy between learners’ experiences and their actual
preferences of instructional focus results in difficulties in implementation of
CLT.
