Departmental Info
The Foreign Language Education Department (FLED), founded in 1984, offers a four-year undergraduate program leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language Education that aims to prepare students as teachers of English in primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions. The curriculum includes courses in theoretical, methodological and pedagogical approaches to the acquisition and teaching of foreign languages. Through elective courses, students can explore additional subjects and develop their knowledge in other fields. Agreements with local public and private schools afford students an opportunity for supervised teaching practice. The department also has staff and student exchange programs with leading universities across the world.
The MA and PhD programs in English Language Education, which were introduced in 1990 and 1994, respectively, both continue with the aim of preparing graduate students for an academic career in Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Education and also aim to enhance the professional knowledge and skills of those students who already hold teaching positions. A balance between theory and application is maintained throughout the graduate programs, as this ensures that students develop advanced, specialized knowledge in the field and become proficient in academic research skills, while they learn to apply theories to practice. Graduates of the Master’s program often continue their graduate work in the field, or continue their teaching and research activities in their professional lives. Those awarded a PhD degree typically choose to pursue academic careers at universities.
The faculty members of the Department have specializations in different fields, ranging from sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics to child and adult second language learning/teaching, technology-enhanced language teaching, teacher education, and language assessment. Their wide-ranging scientific contributions to the field include both national and international publications, as well as numerous research collaborations and projects, some of which are supported by prestigious funding institutions, such as the Boğaziçi University Scientific Research Fund (BU/BAP), the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), and the European Union Research Commission. Many of the faculty members have been serving on the editorial boards of internationally recognized high-impact journals.
The department has several research groups involving faculty and graduate students conducting research on the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism, as well as second language acquisition and English language education and regularly organizing scientific meetings and hosting national and international conferences on campus.
The department has a psycholinguistics laboratory that currently has two state-of- the-art eye-trackers that have been used in the faculty’s research projects to examine a variety of topics, such as reading span tasks as measures of working memory capacity, cognitive load of captions in second language listening, reading strategies of second language learners, and the processing of morphology in Turkish-English bilinguals. The recent addition to the laboratory is the Eyelink 1000 Plus eye-tracker through which more sensitive measures are obtained for exploring subtle morpho-syntactic and metric factors underlying monolingual and bilingual sentence processing. The psycholinguistics laboratory allows for collaborations among graduate students and faculty in our programs and those from Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology, as well as other departments in the Faculty of Education.
The department has a computer laboratory and a smart classroom that are both used, not only for teaching, but also for research purposes, providing a well-equipped setting for research experiments on language assessment and technology-enhanced language teaching and learning. The department also has a library with a wide collection of textbooks and audio-visual materials that is open to the use of both undergraduate and graduate students.
