No abstract

Oral communication is an interactive process in which an individual alternately takes the roles of speaker and listener. Thus, rather than focusing on each skill separately, these skills should be considered integratedly. In order for students to overcome the burdens in listening and speaking skills, they need to develop communicative competence, especially strategic competence. With reference to speaking, strategic competence points out the ability to know how to keep a conversation going, how to terminate the conversation, and how to clear up communication breakdowns and comprehension problems (Shumin, 1994). Therefore, the aim of this quantitative study is to investigate both speaking and listening strategies (so called "communication strategies") used by EFL students to cope with problems during communication so they can be integrated into language teaching in order to develop students' strategic competence. Two hundred ninety-one Turkish EFL university students participated in this study. Researchers used the "Communication Strategy Inventory", a 5 point Likert-type scale developed by Yaman, Irgin and Kavasoglu (2011). The findings of this study revealed that EFL students used negotiation for meaning, compensatory, and getting the gist strategies in communication. It also found that female students used communication strategies more than males and advanced level students.

Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and high-low context culture situations are important for both EFL/ESL teachers and their students. In the EFL context, tertiary level students in Turkey are taught by both native and non-native English speakers, which might be challenging for foreign language students as it causes potential communication breakdowns in the classroom. By regarding cultural values, there is a need to examine how EFL tertiary level students successfully negotiate these cultural differences and how both native and non-native English-speaking teachers might respond to them in classroom situations. This study aimed to investigate what culture group the EFL tertiary level students belong to and to explore to what extent high-and low-context culture situations affect the EFL tertiary level students' communication in the classroom. The participants of the study included 50 EFL tertiary level students, and 15 native and non-native English instructors at a state university in Turkey. The data were collected using the "High or Low Context Culture Questionnaire" (Hall, 1976), and semi structured interviews. A coding and classifying approach (Gay, Mills, & Airasian, 2012) was used for the data analysis. Three categories of cultural conflicts; misperception, misinterpretation, and misevaluation in communication were identified. The result of the current research is important for EFL tertiary level students, TESOL and ESOL teachers. Building ICC helps EFL/ESL students perceive information across cultures, develop strategies in communication and overcome challenging situations in various contexts. Future research in other EFL/ESL contexts would help to expand the findings of the current study.

There is a substantial amount of research in the field of language teacher cognition reiterating that teachers' beliefs influence their classroom practices; however, teacher beliefs and practices do not always correspond because of the differences in both researchers' and teachers' conceptualization of beliefs and practices. This study aims to investigate the beliefs and practices of 96 language teachers in Turkey. A mixed-method research design was employed to answer the questions to what extent teachers' beliefs and practices reflect the issues stated in the literature on second language listening, what their beliefs and listening instructional practices are, whether their beliefs and practices converge, and if so, what factors underpin them.

This paper reports on an exploratory investigation into the impacts of implicit instruction of listening strategies on strategy use and listening performance of young EFL learners in Turkey. Data from 34 lower-intermediate learners of English in two-4 th grade-classes in a primary school were analysed to investigate to what extent their employment of listening strategies varied after 12-week-strategy instruction integrated into their listening activities, and whether there was any change in their awareness of top-down and bottom-up processes in listening comprehension. Qualitative instruments of listening interviews were employed in the experimental and control groups to explore young learners' listening strategy use. Also, self-assessment grids and a pre-and post-test provided evidence of how the experimental group class had changed their reported strategy use and performance in listening comprehension. Analysis of the data revealed a difference in young learners' listening performance and strategy use over the examined time period, including a reported change in awareness of listening, increase in self-confidence, and a greater willingness to engage in strategy use. These findings are discussed in terms of the development in listening comprehension in English. This study implies that listening strategy instruction should be integrated in second language listening classroom to better young learners' listening.