Yasemin Bayyurt

Non‐native English language teachers’ perspective on culture in English as a Foreign Language classrooms

This article examines the importance of raising non‐native English language teachers’ awareness of different dimensions of culture in the teaching of English as an international language. The author believes that the more critical English language teachers become about the involvement of culture in their English language teaching, the more they equip their students with the necessary linguistic and cultural resources to be able to communicate with people from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The study comprises the development and implementation of a semi‐structured interview. The participants are a small group of Turkish teachers of English working in public and private schools in Turkey. Drawing on the results of the interview study, the author shows that there is a general consensus among the participants of the study on the practice of referring to an ‘international culture’ with special emphasis on English‐speaking Anglo‐American cultures, as well as the learners’ local culture in the English as a Foreign Language classroom. Moreover, the results also reveal the participant teachers’ belief that being a non‐native English‐speaking teacher is an advantage as far as cultural and linguistic issues in the English language classroom are concerned.

ELF-Aware In-Service Teacher Education: A Transformative Perspective

Recent work in the field of English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF) has been focused on defining, delineating, and clarifying the nature of ELF. While some work has addressed issues of teacher education and training (see below for a review), we have yet to see a comprehensive proposal that aims both to educate English as a Foreign Language (henceforth EFL) or English as a Second Language (henceforth ESL) teachers about ELF and to engage them in developing, teaching, and evaluating ELF-aware lessons in their own teaching context.

Isolated form-focused instruction and integrated form-focused instruction in primary school English classrooms in Turkey

Content-based language instruction and form-focused instruction (FFI) have been investigated extensively in the context of English as a second language. However, there has not been much research concerning FFI in the context of English as a foreign language. The study described here explores the effect of integrated and isolated FFI on the vocabulary, grammar, and writing development of foreign language learners in two separate classes at the primary level in Turkey. It also investigates students’ attitudes towards integrated and isolated FFI. Findings suggest that the students receiving integrated FFI performed better than students receiving isolated FFI in all measures. In addition, the students expressed a preference for integrated FFI.

Mobile as a Mainstream – Towards Future Challenges in Mobile Learning

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning, mLearn 2014, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in November 2014. The 20 revised full papers and 17 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on technologies and interaction; tablets and ebook readers; learning and teaching inside and outside the classroom; learning design and design implications; evaluation and review studies; development and national perspectives; inquiry-based learning and science applications; work-based learning; theory; language learning; learner perspectives.

The implementation of an intercultural competence syllabus to prepare study-abroad students for global communication

Abstract This study presents the outcome of the implementation of a process-oriented model of an intercultural competence (IC) and English as a lingua franca (ELF)-awareness development syllabus to prepare government-sponsored Turkish international sojourners for global communication in English L1 countries. Based on social constructivist research methodology, both, qualitative and quantitative data were used in the study that came from three major sources. The qualitative data included field notes obtained from a class of 10 study-abroad English preparatory students and interviews conducted with the preparatory school administrators, and the quantitative data came from pre-tests and post-tests which demonstrated a considerable shift in the attitudes of the participants of the experimental group with a boost in their ELF awareness and intercultural sensitivity compared to their control group counterparts. The outcome of the study underlines the significance of IC and ELF awareness development during language preparatory programmes prior to sojourn.

ELF-Aware Pre-service Teacher Education to Promote Glocal Interactions: A Case Study in Turkey

The current chapter is grounded in a qualitative case study exploring the ways in which Turkish pre-service teachers of English at an English-medium state university construct their professional identities in reference to English as a lingua franca aware (ELF-aware) teaching practice they are involved in during their practicum. The study was conducted as a part of a larger ELF-aware teacher education project based on a transformative teacher education model proposed by Sifakis (2014) based on Mezirow’s (1991) transformative learning theory. This model initially aimed at developing in-service teachers ELF awareness and asking them to question constructs such as nativeness/non-nativeness, ownership of English, intelligibility, and standard varieties of English (Bayyurt and Sifakis 2015a, b; Sifakis and Bayyurt 2017). Along these lines, in approaching ELF in the project, pre-service teachers are challenged to conceptualize, potentially problematize and attend to essentialized, native speaker-centric constructions of language learning, use, and instruction, in approaching their practice. Thus, these teachers are moving away from the abstract, idealized native speaker NS (Caucasian, Western, and largely male), and toward exploring who they are (beyond the NS construct), who they and their students might interact with, where, and for what purposes. This shift toward context may result in tensions in the classroom (or in professional development, in this case), as pre-service teachers and their students explore the individuals, ideas, and information involved in contextualized, glocal movement and interaction within and across borders, and in the process, confront dominant constructions of “Self” and “Other” in and beyond the society in which they live.

The Interculturality of Graduate Turkish Sojourners to English L1 Countries

Intercultural competence has been considered a fundamental aspect of cross-cultural communication and has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years especially in terms of use of English in international encounters. However, much of the discussions have remained at an abstract level with little emphasis on the instruction dimension to meet the intercultural competence development needs of international graduate students. Based on a needs analysis of Turkish international graduate students, this chapter presents an intercultural competence development syllabus designed for these sojourners to prepare and equip them with the capability and confidence necessary for their interactions in intercultural encounters, in the context of English L1 countries where English as a Lingua Franca is used as a medium of real communication.

The Stages in Mobile-Assisted Language Learning Material Development

Mobile language learning is increasingly becoming an integral part of higher education with a wider availability of lightweight handheld devices, which allow ‘anywhere’ and ‘anytime’ learning. This popular medium also implies “complex” stages for the design of suitable and efficient foreign language learning activities [3], [19]. The current paper illustrates this multi-layered process through which MLARG (Mobile Learning in At-Risk Group) project materials were developed. First 81 tourism vocational high school students’ perceptions of English language learning needs, lacks and wants were scrutinized under the theoretical foundations laid by Dudley-Evans and St. John [9]. Then an appropriate and stimulating mobile language learning platform was constructed whereby learners’ positive attitudes, language proficiency and technological literacy would be boosted in lieu of the traditional time-and place-constrained learning practices.

Comment 4 on Mahboob and Liang

In their paper, Mahboob and Liang criticize the research methods that are used in investigating different varieties of World Englishes (WEs). They state that these studies adopt nation-state based general descriptions [as stated in Mahboob and Szenes (2010) and Saraceni (2010)] of these varieties, rather than taking a context-sensitive approach to describe them (p. 126). I agree with the authors about taking into account the context-sensitive properties of the data in analyzing varieties of WEs. However, it is difficult to imagine how this could be applied to all WEs’ contexts with smaller or larger geographical regions. Labelling these varieties in a broader sense is another problem, such as the case of China English. The question that still remains in my mind after reading this article is: ‘Is it really possible to call a particular variety China English apart from its distinct phonological and phonetic features?’. In their article, the authors consider various studies on the description of ‘China English’ (CE). They argue that the current research results on CE do have many limitations as researchers do not take into account (so fail to describe) the contextual features of this particular variety in their descriptions. They state that these studies focus on users of the particular variety in question rather than its uses (Mahboob, 2010 ). They exemplify studies on syntax describing CE as a particular variety of WEs. I believe they chose CE as China is a geographically large country and there is highly marked regional variation in Chinese language, e.g. those in the Canton region speak Cantonese that is mutually unintelligible with Mandarin. As a result, there are essentially many different varieties of Chinese that current research on the syntactic features of China English does not take into account, in order to develop their argument. They document and categorize the studies carried out on syntactic features of CE and the findings of these studies share similar results with other varieties of English. They question the adequacy of the research methods in these studies as well. On page 126, they state that most of these studies fail to describe and overlook similarities between different varieties of Englishes. They identify six issues and analyze the studies accordingly – i.e. uniqueness; register variation; using norms or writing for describing oral language; insufficient sociolinguistic information; stability and extent of use; and problematic sources of data. They give examples for all of these issues. For example, the uniqueness of CE is questioned in the inversion in subordinate finite wh-clause as it can be observed in other varieties of Englishes as well, e.g. South African Indian English.