The present study explores department of Physics prep students' (department of Physics students attending English preparatory program) relative performance in English grammar by the use of contextual learning materials in the actual classroom instruction based on the contextual learning theory. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of teaching grammar in physics context for the physics prep students to increase their interests in learning English. Another primary goal of the study is to evaluate the teaching activities which are developed in accordance with the REACT (relating, experiencing, applying, cooperating and transferring) strategy in context based approach. The study was with 25 students of Physics at an English prep-school in Turkey. With the aim of determining the effect of contextual teaching materials, sample lessons based on the contextual knowledge and the target grammar points were made. Following the lessons, a structured interview was delivered to the five of the participants. One result is that the incorporation of REACT strategy into the teaching of English to the Physics students proved to be useful for the learners who took part in the study, adding that relating, experiencing, applying, cooperating and transferring the knowledge respectively helped them use and retain the knowledge far more than the traditional classroom teaching methods in grammar teaching. Another specific outcome of the overall findings is that students were able to establish connections between what they learn and how that knowledge can be utilized in physics, which, in turn, has increased their motivation to a higher level.

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Gratitude strategies used by EFL speakers have always been the focus of interest by researchers who observed the presence of pragmatic transfer strategies by which speakers express their gratitude. We have seen that several adapted versions of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) by Eisenstein and Bodman (1986) are constructed based on the original version and largely applied to the participants from various backgrounds. A similar methodology is used in this study and we investigated the gratitude strategies of participants, including 80 EFL learners in Turkey and 70 non-native European speakers of English at tertiary-level. We also interviewed with 44 Turkish speaking participants and used two sampling methodologies to identify the participants that could promote the data obtained from the DCTs. Our research entailed quantitative and qualitative data examined through content analysis. Primary findings indicated strong divergences and weak similarities between both speaker groups who resorted to the speech act of thanking compared to non-native European speakers who also differed in thanking strategies. Finally, we have been provided with valuable indications for the constituent parts of the language teaching that neglect the instructional side on the pragmatic use of language for gratitude and other speech acts.

This study aims at a rediscovery of the extent to which a Data Driven Learning (DDL)-based intervention could become instrumental in facilitating grammar instruction with a specific focus on EAP and learner autonomy in a preparatory program mostly by Turkish-L1 learners. It provides a context-restricted longitudinal depiction of the effectiveness of a DDL-based grammar instruction endorsed by teacher mentorship across groups asynchronously, thus re-testing the limits of DDL-oriented corpus pedagogy in contexts where a control group is not available. To this end, a corpus was compiled out of the existing reading and listening materials in use ad hoc the Alternative Corpus of Academic Texts (ACAT), and a total of 19 grammar lessons covering topics in the curriculum of the second level of the grammar course were developed using the ACAT. Blind pre and post-test procedures were administered with all four experimental groups independent of each other to gradually build up an understanding of the governing pattern of learner achievement through DDL and corpus-based teacher-prepared materials. The analysis demonstrated a rise in student achievement across all groups despite the lack of a teacher disseminating knowledge to students in class in the traditional sense, thus showing that a sense of autonomy could be gained through DDL-enhanced teaching. With the design being unorthodox, this study shows that the triple powers of DDL, self-discovery, occasional teacher supervision, and corpus-based teaching materials, could help learners survive autonomously no matter how hectic the curriculum run at an institution is. Further research is needed to deepen this insight so that this sort of DDL practice could be implemented at the institutional level

The relation between corpus based applications and language teaching in EFL context is far more obvious today, due to the potential of computerized corpus to offer new insights for the language teaching opportunities, which calls for efficient and technology literate language teachers. Although corpus and corpus tools attract a great deal of attention in research community, the use of corpora in EFL classrooms remains limited for various reasons. Part of the reason behind this picture may be due to unpopularity of corpus and corpus tools among the language teachers. Thus, the aim of this case study is to discuss ways of familiarizing language teachers with the potential benefits of the corpus tools and of increasing their perceptions towards it, since this will be an essential step towards the integration of these tools into the classroom environment. To this end, a case study with six (6) language teachers in an EFL context was carried out. Purposive sampling was used in the selection of the samples. Data on the perceptions expressed by the language teachers were collected through open ended interviews. The results suggest that almost all six teachers favored the language exploration process through a range of concordance searches on structural and lexical aspects of language but added that the potential of corpus to offer wide range of grammatical structures and lexical patterns at one time may be difficult to grasp for themselves as well as for their students in the classroom. IntroductionIt is a long consensus by now that with the integration of technological tools, especially the computer, language studies around the globe have taken a new turn. These dramatic changes were felt mostly in the way that the languages are studied and thus the scope of the boundaries for the language studies have been extended far beyond. In fact, the emergence of computerized corpus and its widely available applications to the language studies are among the concrete examples of what can be done in linguistic research with a computer. Computerized corpus studies have become popular thanks to the advances in computer technology, through which it has become largely possible to store, explore and analyze large language data through concordance component of corpus. The use of computerized corpus for language pedagogical purposes started with the COBUILD learner dictionary project in 1987 by Sinclair (1987). This is followed by the compilation and analysis of learner corpora such as ICLE by Granger (1998) and her corpus research team. This and many other corpus based studies showed that the relation between the corpus linguistics and foreign language teaching should be established firmly and that corpus, corpus tools and corpus methodologies offer a lot for use in language teaching.Corpus linguistics presents us with profound changes in the way that we study, teach and learn languages all over the world due to its huge potential to present entirely authentic and genuine samples of language use. A well-known definition of "corpus" as...