A case study on EFL teachers' views on material adaptation for teaching pragmatics / Ç. Karatepe; M.

The purpose of the present study is to shed light on the attitudes of Turkish EFL teachers towards online instruction (OI), the impact of training on their attitudes, the obstacles they encounter, and the strategies to deliver OI more successfully throughout the Covid-19 outbreak. The participants were 70 EFL teachers (52 female, 18 male). The data was collected through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed by using SPSS 26. Descriptive statistics of each item was calculated and an independent sample t-test was conducted to answer the research questions. For the analysis of the interview data, the responses of the participants were transcribed and the recurring themes were identified. The results revealed that the attitudes of Turkish EFL teachers, who experienced online instruction during the Covid-19 outbreak, are not as positive as expected regarding some of the results of the related research in the literature. The interview findings revealed that EFL teachers do not feel capable of delivering online instruction effectively since they do not have adequate knowledge and necessary skills to do that. In view of the findings, it’s suggested that online instruction methodology should be integrated into teacher training programs and teachers should receive an in-service training about the related subject.

With the recognition of English as a Lingua Franca, intercultural communication has gained great importance. As a result, culture teaching has become an indispensable component of EFL classrooms. Even though there has been extensive research on the attitudes of EFL teachers towards culture teaching, few studies were found bringing attention to the differences between private and state school teachers to this end. The purpose of this research is therefore to shed light on private and state school EFL teachers’ attitudes towards culture teaching, their classroom practices, and the obstacles they come across upon this. The participants are 72 EFL teachers (32 state, 32 private) working at different institutions in Turkey. The data were collected employing a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that both private and state school teachers have positive attitudes towards culture incorporation in their lessons. However, private school EFL teachers were proven to have more positive opinions about culture teaching. The findings also indicated that both private and state school EFL teachers integrate culture into their lessons to some extent. However, both groups reported some obstacles that they come across while teaching culture. The details are further discussed and the implications are made in the article. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0774/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Although the use of technology for pragmatics instruction has attracted significant attention from scholars, the number of studies regarding the impact of self-access materials to this end is limited. Nearpod is a useful cloud-based application to support self-paced learning. This paper aims to probe the effect of learning through Nearpod on EFL learners’ request performance. Researchers designed seven self-access courses to teach requests. The data was collected from 11 EFL learners through Online Oral Discourse Completion Tasks before and after the treatment. The post-test results revealed that the participants significantly improved their request performance after the treatment. The learners’ responses in the pre-test and the post-test were also qualitatively analyzed for an in-depth investigation of the changes in their requesting behavior. The findings revealed that the learners stopped modality generalization and started using a variety of modal verbs according to the context of situation after the treatment. Additionally, it was indicated that self-paced pragmatics instruction helped learners overcome the pragmatic failures regarding the main verb use in request head acts. Furthermore, the differences regarding the learners’ use of internal and external modifiers were also documented. After the treatment, they performed various internal modifiers that were either absent or uncommon in the pre-test data. Alerters and grounders were found to be the most frequent external modifiers in both the pre-test and the post-test data set. In summary, the results indicated that self-paced learning helped learners improve strategies for performing appropriate requests.