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ARTICLE INFO This mixed-design study aims to explore student teachers' views on their own competency as prospective English language teachers and on how successful the teacher education program they are enrolled is in terms of preparing them for these competencies. Thirty-two senior students studying at the Foreign Languages Education Department (FLED) of a state university in Turkey participated in this study. A scale including Likert-type items measuring the perceived competency of student teachers on three subsections and open-ended items which seek to reach a deeper understanding of the choices participants selected in the closed-ended part was used as the data collection instrument. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods were employed in order to analyze the questionnaire. The results obtained from descriptive and inferential statistics showed that the order of teacher candidates' perceived competency areas from more competent to less was as follows: 1) monitoring, assessment, and professional development, 2) planning, teaching, and classroom management area, 3) language and subject area. Specifically, using assessment methods relevant to the subject effectively and knowing a variety of assessment methods were discovered to be competencies that student teachers feel the least confident. These results were further discussed in relation to the recent studies conducted in Turkey after the educational reforms of 1997 and 2006 in the pre-service English teacher education departments' curriculums.

Vocabulary knowledge that constitutes the milestones of written and oral language is one of the essentials of foreign language learning. Despite its vital importance, vocabulary learning and teaching does not get the necessary attention in L2 learning. As possession of lexical knowledge is a sine qua non for communicative competence, it is essential to study learners’ vocabulary levels in Turkey, where English is taught as a foreign language (EFL). Within this context, this study aims to examine the effect of grade level and gender variation in EFL receptive vocabulary size of a group of young learners. The New Vocabulary Levels Test (McLean & Kramer, 2015) was used to determine the receptive vocabulary sizes of young learners across four years of middle school. It was found that all the participating learners know the most frequent 2,000 words in English, which is a critical learning objective for low-level EFL learners. In addition, a developmental pattern, which shows incremental increase in vocabulary size as the grade levels increase, was observed. The findings obtained from this study add to our knowledge of the incremental patterns of vocabulary development, and of gender differences in vocabulary knowledge.