The situation of spoken English in both formal and informal settings in Turkey seems to be far from satisfactory. Additionally, the legal arrangements devoted to ameliorate this predicament have proven unsuccessful as far as an acceptable level of competence is concerned. The present study aimed to investigate the situation of English speaking skills at the English Language Teaching (ELT) departments in Turkey, in attempts to attain a descriptive outline for the problems, perceptions, needs, and solutions proposed by lecturers and pre-service teachers. To achieve this, a questionnaire and semi-structured interview were administered to the lecturers and pre-service teachers at seven ELT departments across Turkey, with one department from each of the seven geographical regions. The results indicated that although they had been studying English for more than 6 years, a great majority of the participants could not speak English as proficiently as they were supposed to do. It was also revealed that the participants had difficulty achieving fluency and maintaining confidence when speaking English mainly because they had no appropriate contexts that would allow them to master English speaking skills. On the other hand, an extensive policy change in foreign language education was the most commonly proposed solution.

Pronunciation instruction is an integral part of language teaching/learning processes. The aim of this study was to explore ELT students' and lecturers' beliefs on the learning and teaching of English pronunciation. A questionnaire containing Likert-type items probing the participants' views on pronunciation instruction was designed and administered to 125 students and 6 lecturers at an ELT department in Turkey. Additionally, the lecturers were interviewed via a semi-structured interview so as to gain a deeper insight into the subject matter. The lecturers stated that heavy accents have a discriminating effect among ESL speakers and they also strongly agreed with the idea that there exists an age limit in the learnability of pronunciation, while the students remained unsure about these two notions. Additionally, no significant difference was found between the lecturers and students, between genders, among the educational levels of the students, and the numbers of participants' native languages with regard to lecturers' and students' beliefs on pronunciation instruction. As for the conclusion, the analysis of the data revealed that (i) lecturers and students held different attitudes towards pronunciation, (ii) their perceptions on the challenges in pronunciation differed from each other, and (iii) lecturers believed that there was a vicious circle in the process of teaching/learning pronunciation.