The present study investigated EFL adult learners' reasons behind learning English in a new setting with a mixed-design research methodology. The subjects of this study were forty adult English language learners, 20 males and 20 females, who were learning English as a foreign language in a private English language school in Istanbul. Necessary data regarding the participants’ reasons for learning English were collected through two instruments: questionnaires and interviews. The data analysis revealed that external factors such as finding a job and personal interests such as the desire to make friends urged and encouraged the participants to enrol in the private English language school to improve their English after a hard day of work or study. The study's findings concluded that both instrumental and integrative motivation played roles in the participants’ drives to study English.

Twitter plays an important role in today’s world. Its role among politicians and those who are interested in politics is more obvious. Due to its importance and special characteristics such as character limits, it has drawn the attention of many researchers including linguists and ELT researchers. This study aimed to compare the perceptions of native and nonnative speakers in identifying speech acts in Donald Trump’s tweets. The subjects of this study were nine English native speakers and twenty nonnative English teachers who were Turkish citizens. Thirty- seven tweets of Donald Trump over the course of a week were selected and the participants were asked to identify the speech acts of the tweets based on the speech acts taxonomy by Searle (1976). The analysis of the data revealed that both native and nonnative speakers of English identified the speech acts of the large majority of the tweets very differently. These differences were partly due to lack of enough political as well as background knowledge and partly due to lack of contextual variables.