Completed Research Projects
Communities, Languages, and Activities App (ENACT) project is developing a web app to bring culture to life by employing an innovative task-based digital learning pedagogy offering a real-world, interactive learning experience. It aims to foster intercultural and intergenerational social cohesion and understanding through two-way knowledge exchange; create inclusive higher education systems through a local learning ecologies approach; and model an innovative task-based digital pedagogy for learning and online (virtual) exchange between communities.The project is led by Newcastle University (UK), and the consortium partners are: Boğaziçi University (Turkey), Cultura Foundation (Finland), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), and University of Helsinki (Finland). Project website: https://enacteuropa.com/
This study investigates English teachers’ socialization to the school, their behaviour in classrooms and attitudes towards their profession within the first years after graduation. Recent graduates face many difficulties in their professional environments and many of them lose their contacts with their instructors at universities (Farrell, 2012). The new graduates quit their jobs as teachers with a rate of 10% within the first year of recruitment, and with a rate of between 25 and 50 % within the first three years in the field (Öztürk, 2008, p.20). Many students lack motivation towards learning English and have a resistance against learning a foreign language in Turkey where English is not used outside the educational settings (British Council, 2003). This particular situation causes teachers a burden and result in teacher burnout within the first few years of their professional involvement in the field (Güneş & Uysal, 2014). There are few studies on the difficulties and the socialization period of newly appointed teachers with a rather limited sample representation. Therefore, it is essential to determine the difficulties teachers face in the field and investigate ways to facilitate these processes with a comprehensive study on a large scale. Based on the nature of this study, the study could achieve this aim.
The sample consists of English Language teachers who are serving within the first three years of their profession in cities with high rates of governmental teacher placements. To this end, the number of English Language teachers who have been positioned at state schools since 2013 and are within the first three years of working experience, and the regions and cities where these teachers work are determined by analysing the data provided by the Ministry of Education. 16 cities where there are high rates of teacher placement are selected based on the data received from the Ministry of Education. The study will be conducted in five steps: (1) development of the questionnaire and piloting (2) the administration and the evaluation of the questionnaire (3) development of the class observation schemes and the interview questions to be asked to the teachers based on the results of the questionnaire, and piloting, (4) entrance to the field, conducting the observations and the semi-structured interviews and (5) the analysis of the elicited data and writing up the report.
The field work will last for a full academic year, and the teachers will be asked to take regular notes about the challenging situations they face during their lectures in the classroom. 30 English teachers will be contacted from three cities within the sample (İstanbul, Adana, Samsun), and their lessons will be observed at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the semester. The teachers will be interviewed at the end of these observations. Each week, there will be two hours of observation and interviews will take place at the end of the classroom observations. It is aimed in the current study that both qualitative and quantitative data will be used so that they support each other. Upon the statistical analyses of the data, the areas in which the teachers have difficulty during their socialization period will be determined and presented in a corpus so that it will help us gain further understanding about the behaviours, emotions and attitudes of English Language teachers in the school environment by portraying the beginning English Language teachers’ roles in curriculum and language teaching activities in the classroom. The present study will provide some suggestions about pre-service and in-service teacher education programs and thus contribute to the development of educational curricula for these programs.
The classification of issues that arise during the socialization period of teachers can help create a corpus to utilize while developing materials for use in pre-service and in-service education. The results of the present study can provide significant implications for in-service teacher education programs and pre-service education curricula at universities. A course named “Teacher Socialization: Introduction to Teaching” could be included in the curricula of teacher education programs at universities in order to raise pre-service teachers’ awareness and knowledge about possible difficulties they could face in the field and help them implement their teaching skills effectively in classroom through reinforcing their mechanisms to cope with these difficulties. With respect to its structure and purposes, this study could form a bridge between the pre-service and in-service foreign language teacher education programs.
EU-Speak3 is a three year project (2015-2018), focussing on the needs of teachers who work with immigrants with little or no education (LESSLA learners) in their mother tongue. The Project partners from seven universities aim to make a difference in the educational outcomes for immigrants through the development of free international on-line teacher training modules with special reference to bilingualism/multilingualism, vocabulary acquisition, literacy development in a second/third language. Six on-line modules are being designed and developed by the partners in six countries and offered twice from 2016 to 2018, in English and German, Finnish, Spanish and Turkish. The Boğaziçi team has been working with Syrian Refugee children and adults.
The project aims to investigate undergraduate students’ academic literacy practices in their first languages (L1s) and second languages (L2s).
The project aims to investigate the role of phrase lengths in silent reading in Turkish and whether or not phrase lengths interact with syntactic parsing strategies in modulating human sentence processing routines.
The study focuses on specific linguistic indicators that can be attributed to developmentally noteworthy changes in writing performance, and also investigates whether linguistic improvement is related to argumentation capacity and whether improved critical thinking ability fosters argumentation construction in L2 advanced writing.
This project investigates the representation of multimorphemic words in the mental lexicon. The project includes psycholinguistic experiments (e.g., online lexical decision paradigms) in Turkish and in English. The studies aim to examine whether the mental representation of/access to words is different in native and nonnative speakers.
This study aims to investigate the role of priming in adult second language (L2) acquisition of morphology. More precisely, the purpose is to explore whether (un)grammatical priming plays a role in adult L2 speakers’ (in)accurate use of an inflectional morpheme in English (i.e., the third person agreement –s). To this end, two experiments were designed to investigate whether grammatical and ungrammatical morphosyntactic priming has any impacts on L1 Turkish-L2 English learners’ subsequent production of the third person singular -s. The study also explored the duration of priming. The study involved a pre-test-post-test design and the data was based on oral production. Participants were asked to describe pictures shown on a computer screen subsequent to different prime sentences they heard from the researcher in the confederate-scripting paradigm. Participant’s correct and incorrect use of the target morpheme in their descriptions of the experimental items were then analyzed and quantified to identify priming effects in immediate and delayed post-tests.
The aim of this project is to fill the gap in the research context of identity studies by shifting the focus from second language learning contexts to foreign language learning contexts. This project, specifically, aims to investigate Turkish English as a foreign language (EFL) learner identity in the Turkish setting. The project aims to answer the following research questions: Will an EFL learner experience an identity change after learning English? If yes, what type of changes will s/he experience? If yes, what are the factors affecting this change? The study will be carried out at the English Preparatory School (prep school) of a highly competitive, English-medium state university in Istanbul. Quantitative and qualitative data will be collected from an advanced level learner enrolled in this program to better understand the process that s/he experiences while learning English in a foreign language learning context along with his/her thoughts and feelings as s/he engages with both formal (i.e., classroom) and informal (i.e. outside the classroom) language practices. Quantitative data will be collected by a background survey to learn how many advanced level students use English outside the classroom and how many of them would be interested in a research project and qualitative data will be collected by the following sources: journals that are written by the participant, video recordings of the participant’s classes, transcripts of stimulated recall, interviews conducted with the participant, interview with instructors, and researcher journal. To collect data, a video-recorder and a digital audio-recorder will be used. Data will be analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods. For quantitative analysis, data obtained from the background surveys will be analyzed by frequency counts. For qualitative analysis, data gathered from video and audio recordings will be transcribed. Then, they will be coded for themes or categories. Transcription (Subscriber transcription program) and analysis (Atlas.ti scientific software) of the data will be done by using a computer and related software programs. Before the project starts, consent from the institution, the participating learner, and his/her instructors will be taken indicating they are voluntarily participating in the project. During the study, there will not be any content that will harm the institution, the participant or the instructors or degrade their legal rights. None of the content of the research project will be used for commercial purposes. At the end of the project, all the data and the information gathered from the institution, the participant.
Academic writing curricula should emphasize students’ awareness towards becoming more expressive and clear when they write in Turkish and in English. For example, they should learn when and where hedging is appropriate. Writing instructors in English programs should be aware of this so that they can be alert to the possible influence of students’ L1 on their L2 writing, and arrange appropriate instructions if this be the case. There is not much research done on hedging in academic writing in the Turkish context. Therefore, this study aims to close this gap and provide the academic audience with the details of university students’ academic writing practices in Turkish and English. In order to do that a larger corpus of Turkish students’ academic writing in Turkish and in English should be compiled and the occurrence of metadiscoursal features should be analyzed for pattern and significance. This project will establish the basis of the Boğaziçi University English Language Learner Corpora (BUELC), which will be the first organized written corpora of English language learners/users in higher education instutions in Turkey.
