The role that parents' involvement play in young learners' English learning process has been investigated in various contexts from different perspectives. This study aims to explore English language teachers' perceptions about the role of parental involvement in young learners' English language learning process. For this purpose, data were collected through a questionnaire which has 5 open-ended questions. The questionnaire was sent to 25 English language teachers working at three different private primary schools in Ankara. The collected data are then analyzed by adopting inductive content analysis. Five themes emerged based on the answers provided by the teachers which include: (1) factors influencing students' achievement, (2) significance of parental involvement, (3) parents' way of involvement in English language teaching/learning process, (4) strategies that parents use to encourage parental involvement, and (5) teachers' need for further training on parental involvement. The results indicate that the teachers are aware of the importance of parental involvement, yet they do not use any specific strategy to foster parental involvement. Also, teachers view themselves as the lead and main figures in young learners' English language development whereas they regard the parents only as one of the factors that assist young learners in learning English.
T he purpose of the research was to examine the effectiveness of Conflict Resolution and Peer Mediation (CRPM) training on high school students' interpersonal conflicts. The CRPM training program was developed by the researchers as a 31-hour program that addressed four basic conflict resolution skills; understanding the nature of interpersonal conflicts, communication skills, anger management skills, and negotiation and peer mediation skills. The study was conducted in a high school located in Izmir, Turkey which served students from low SES families. During the two-year study, a total of 830 students received training, and following the training, 12 peer mediator students were elected from each classroom by their friends. These peer mediators handled their friends' conflicts during three semesters. Data were collected through the peer mediation forms filled by the mediator students following the mediation sessions. A total of 253 mediation sessions were held; 240 (94.9%) resulted in resolution and 13 (5.1%) in no-resolution. Results of the study indicated that CRPM training could prove to be effective in resolving high school students' conflicts.
■ KEYWORDS: conflict resolution and peer mediationPeer-mediation programs have become a widely accepted student-centred intervention to respond to increasing student violence in schools. One of the reasons for this acceptance is the perceived ineffectiveness of adult-imposed models in warranting the desired positive change in students' behaviour. Despite the widespread use of such peer-mediation models, especially in developed countries, limited data exist on the effectiveness of these programs in developing countries. In today's globalised world, more research to test the effectiveness of similar models in different cultures is needed. The present study involved testing the effectiveness of peer-mediation approach, based on western theory and practice, in a different setting in terms of pedagogical orientation, discipline concept, behaviour management, child-rearing practice and sociocultural dynamics. Interpersonal violence in schools continues to jeopardise the safety and quality of education in the schools today. Woody (2001) argues that school violence has received greater attention in society and in the professional literature in the past decade, primarily because of the recent occurrence of increased acts of violence in schools throughout the world. However, these acts of violence are often less extreme forms such as verbal
Recent studies have examined the interactional management of verbal and non-verbal vocabulary explanations in second language (L2) classrooms. However, the use of material resources in vocabulary explanations has not been fully investigated yet. Based on a corpus of fourteen class-hours of (50-min each) video recordings of an L2 Oral Communication classroom at a higher education setting in Turkey, this study explores how material resources are employed in vocabulary explanation sequences in combination with talk and gestures. Using the micro-analytic lens of multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) for the examination of the detailed transcriptions of vocabulary explanation sequences with material resources, three different patterns were identified: (1) gesture + material resources; (2) talk + gesture + material resources; and (3) scene enactment + material resources. The findings of this study contribute to classroom interaction research, more specifically to studies on vocabulary teaching, by providing a micro-analytic account of how material resources are employed in vocabulary explanations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.