The present research examined the use of Web 2.0 tools to improve students' vocabulary knowledge at the School of Foreign Languages, Gaziantep University. Current studies in literature mostly deal with descriptions of students' attitudes towards the reasons for the use of web-based platforms. However, integrating usual classroom environment with Web 2.0 tools for specific sub-skills has not been examined much. It is aimed to contribute by investigating the feasibility of those tools as a supplement for vocabulary learning. This is an experimental research supported with semi-structured interviews and field notes. A pre-test and a post-test were administered to an experimental and a control group, and results were analyzed with the independent samples t-test. Following the post-test, semistructured interviews were conducted with 18 students in the experimental group. The analyses of the test results demonstrated that both groups had gains but the mean of the experimental group was higher, and this difference was statistically significant. Findings suggest that almost all students have positive attitudes towards the educational use of Web 2.0 tools.

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Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects with linguistic stimuli. Speakers of Italian grouped the linguistic stimuli differently from speakers of Turkish and Persian. However, speakers of all languages showed the same perceptual biases when grouping the nonlinguistic auditory and the visual stimuli. The shared perceptual biases appear to be determined by universal grouping principles, and the linguistic differences caused by prosodic differences between the languages. Although previous findings suggest that acquired linguistic knowledge can either enhance or diminish the perception of both linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory stimuli, we found no transfer of native listening effects across auditory domains or perceptual modalities. (PsycINFO Database Record

While intercultural communicative competence has gained considerable attention in teachers’ professional development, studies have underestimated the contributions from teacher candidates. The current study intends to explain whether demographic variables of gender, study year, bi/multilingualism, living in another city, and study abroad experience have a predictive power on intercultural communicative competence. Several multiple regressions were used to analyse 199 teacher candidates’ previous intercultural experiences and findings suggest that number of languages explained the variance in intercultural communicative competence, and compared to bilingual individuals, multilinguals had higher intercultural communicative competence. Study abroad experience and living in another city also predicted the variance. However, gender difference did not yield significant results

This chapter aims to address how Caucasian languages behave in terms of the dichotomy between noun phrases (NPs) and determiner phrases (DPs), dichotomy as specifically discussed in Bošković (2005, 2008, 2012). It uses comparative data from three Caucasian languages, namely, Laz, Abkhaz, and Kabardian. These three languages are chosen because typologically they make use of different strategies to express (in)definiteness. Abkhaz has definite and indefinite articles, while Pazar Laz is a language without articles. Kabardian, which also lacks articles, expresses definiteness and specificity through case morphology. Using Bošković’s own criteria, we show that, we shown that the NP/DP split is not enough to handle the differences among these languages. We propose that a new typology, one that allows for NP- and DP-languages as well as Kase Phrase (KP-) and null-DP-, languages is required to capture the properties of Abkhaz, Pazar Laz, and Kabardian. The chapter then discusses the implications of this new typology for the internal structures of the nominals in these three languages with a focus on what other functional projections are available and how they are ordered in the nominal domains.