Plagiarism continues to dominate the academic world as one of its greatest challenges, and the existing literature suggests cross-cultural investigation of this critical issue may help all shareholders who detect, are confronted by and struggle with this issue to address it. Therefore, the present study, drawing upon a cross-cultural investigation using a questionnaire, aimed to investigate the differences between three groups of students, namely, Turkish (n = 106), Georgian (n = 83) and German (n = 72) regarding their tendency to conduct academic theft. It also investigated ways in which to plagiarise and reasons for and awareness of this issue. The results show that lack of time, busy schedules and weak academic writing skills are the most frequent reasons for plagiarism. However, in contrast to previous studies, the role of the Internet was found to be minimal in relation to increasing plagiarism. It is also worth noting that the German participants were found to have a higher level of sensitivity to this academic malpractice and were seen to be much more successful at identifying it. The article concludes with workable suggestions on how to discourage academic theft at universities.
The attempt to present the profile of a good language teacher is an early arrival, dating back to 1920s. The literature to date abounds with much scholarly attention to exploration of mainly students' and teachers' point of view regarding the issue. However, the paucity of research into other different perspectives in Turkey serves as the backcloth of the current study qualitative in nature, which employs in-depth interviews with the six administrators of six private courses in a province in the northeast part of Turkey with the aim of filling this hiatus. The data gathered via individual indepth interviews were analysed via content analysis, in which the researchers went through the transcribed texts to find the recurring themes, enumerate them, create broad categories out of them, and pick excerpts that could support their interpretations. Although it was not intended to provide definitive good language teacher profile, issues such as a finely-tuned classroom authority, energy, tolerance, creativity, a sound knowledge of language, an ongoing professional development, enhancement of student autonomy, good communication skills, and teaching experience were found as the distinguishing effective teacher characteristics, analogous to the previous studies. However, the findings contradict with the seemingly omnipresent tendency towards describing native speaker as good language teacher in the existing literature in that local Turkish teachers were described as effective teachers with their in-class teaching roles, second language learning experience, strong empathy with students while their native counterparts were valued solely for their communicative ability and potential role to add to institution prestige. The current study with a glimpse of Turkey is believed to help capture the essence of the issue by providing a close scrutiny of a different perspective, in turn yield insight for prospective English language teachers and teacher education planners. Keywords: Teacher qualities; good language teacher; private course; cross-interview analysis Özİyi dil öğretmen profilini tanımlama çabaları 1920'lere kadar uzanan köklü bir gayrettir. Günümüze kadar uzanan bu alanyazın, meseleyi çoğunlukla öğrenci ve öğretmen açısından ele alan sayısız çalışmalarla doludur. Fakat Türkiye'de bu konuda farklı görüş açılarını araştırmak için yapılan çalışmalar yok denecek kadar azdır ve bu bariz açık, Türkiye'nin kuzeydoğusundaki bir ilde bulunan altı özel dil kursundaki toplam altı yönetici ile detaylı bireysel görüşmelerin yapıldığı özünde nitel olan bu çalışma ile doldurulmaya çalışılmıştır. İyi dil öğretmeni profilinin sabit tanımı hedeflenmese de Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, October 2014, 5(4) 42 alanyazında var olan çalışma sonuçlarına benzer olarak hassas dengelenmiş sınıf otoritesi, enerji, tolerans, üretkenlik, iyi bir hedef dil bilgisi, sürekli kişisel gelişim, öğrenci özerkliğini geliştirme, iyi iletişim becerileri ve eğitim tecrübesi gibi özelliklerin iyi bir dil öğretmeni ile özdeşleştirildiği g...
As is clear in the related literature, pronunciation is a neglected area in English language education throughout the world, and thus the area needs to be investigated so that informed decisions regarding pronunciation teaching could be taken. Hence, the present qualitative case study was designed to find out the strategies employed by the preparatory English majors chosen via convenience sampling (n=56, 44 female and 12 male) in a middle-sized university in the north east part of Turkey. Inspired by Oxford's Strategy Game, eleven problem-oriented vignettes applicable for EFL context were devised and piloted. The fabricated vignettes include ten different areas: natural pronunciation, difficult and long words, self-confidence, misunderstanding, sounds not existing in Turkish, tone, sounds existing in native and target language, IPA knowledge, and intonation. The vignettes were quantified and interpreted on the basis of Rokoszewska's (2012) strategy taxonomy. The findings show that while cognitive metacognitive and memory strategies were frequently employed by the participants, social, compensation and affective ones were underused. The analysis also revealed that the participants used a wide variety of tactics in particularly cognitive strategies domain, including listening to tapes, music and watching TV/movie, pronouncing a difficult word over and over, memorising and practising target language sounds over and over, memorising and practising target language phrases, noticing mouth position or watching lips, practising listening, to list but a few. However, as language learning requires the development of not only cognitive and metacognitive but also emotional and interpersonal processes, it can be concluded that these underused strategies need to be promoted with strategy training and students' awareness need to be increased. Thus, the portrayal of pronunciation strategy use is expected to help material developers to integrate pronunciation learning strategies into newly devised instructional materials. The results are also expected to help teachers to take informed decisions about the instructional steps they take in their classrooms and plan strategy training.
Language teachers in Turkey do not take a standard pre-service education as graduates of English Language Teaching (ELT), linguistics, and translation departments all end up with language teaching profession and this, in turn, results in different teaching needs and concerns. The researchers argue that these different concerns may be one of the underlying causes of chronic language education problems in Turkey, in that Turkish Ministry of National Education does not take into consideration the comparative picture of practicing teachers and composes curricula, teaching materials, and compulsory one-shot professional development activities that all reflect "one size fits all" ideology. Therefore, determining the needs and concerns of pre-service language teachers is of vital importance. The current study has arisen from Griffith's (2012) call for more larger-scale studies on teacher concerns across different contexts via triangulation. The researchers aim at not only investigating teacher concerns but also painting a much detailed comparative picture between ELT and linguistics department prospective teachers. The researchers target convenience sampling, in the full knowledge that this group will not represent the whole population. However, this type of nonprobability sampling can serve well when it is easy to gather much informative data. Building * Karadeniz Technical University, Faculty of Letters. on the recent work of Griffiths (2012), the researchers have modified and extended the existing measurement tool of Griffiths (2012) to investigate the issue much deeper and compensate the caveats. They adapted her instrument and asked the participants to add their thoughts as well as deciding their concern level. The results are mainly in line with the referred study in terms of the rating and frequency. The study reveals that there are some differences between the concerns of ELT department students and language and literature department students. While prospective teachers studying at the ELTdepartment were found to be highly concerned about technology, their counterparts studying at the langauge and literature department were not interested in the issue. The study also reveals that despite EIL's large space in the literature (Cogo, 2012;Sowden, 2012), it was not found as a major concern for the prospective teachers. Methodology was also the least rated concern for the prospective teachers at both departments on the contrary to the well-accepted literature. Tarih Kültür ve Sanat Araştırmaları Dergisi (ISSN: 2147-0626)
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.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.