Dictation has been used in the field of language learning for several years. However, most of the language instructors and methodologists regard this method as useless and out-of-date. Indeed it is a teaching technique which enables teachers to focus on language proficiency of their students. It may both be used as a device for teaching a specific language phrase or clause and to list syntactic mistakes. This paper reports pervasive decoding/listening problems of word recognition and segmentation in connected speech at normal and high speed among Turkish high school students at the intermediate level through the use of dictation. The findings of the study indicates that there is a difference between the teacher-lead dictation and tape-recorded dictation during the dictation process.

In today's world, educational contexts are getting increasingly multicultural. Although EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classes in Turkey were mostly composed of Turkish students a decade ago, today students from any part of the world are brought together within the frame of various student exchange programs. In Turkish EFL contexts, students coming from Middle Eastern countries make up a huge part of classes (Özer, 2016). The objective of the current study is to examine L1 negative interference errors of Turkish and Arabic EFL learners. Accordingly, 30 B1 (Intermediate) EFL students' written assignments were examined and divided into categories. Besides, this study makes a comparative analysis of Turkish and Arabic EFL learners' grammatical and lexical errors within the frame of L1 negative transfer. When the results of the Mann-Whitney U test are analyzed, it is understood that Turkish and Arabic students' grammatical interference exam scores differ statistically (p <0.05). When the total amount of errors is analyzed, Turkish students' grammar errors (n=164) stem from, majority of which are articles, preposition and tense errors, respectively as 18.82%, 17.65% and 11.76 whilst Arabic students make a huge part of their errors (n=352) on capitalization, punctuation and tenses/articles, respectively as 16.19%, 15.06%, and 12.78%. In the frame of the lexical category, Turkish students performed 48 lexical errors, the majority of which are spelling and collocation errors. On the other hand, Arabic students committed 96 lexical errors in total, the majority of which are spelling errors (60.4%) while 15.5% of the errors are wrong word choice. In general, lexical errors were fewer than grammatical errors.

APA Citation: Kazazoğlu, Semin. (2020). Is printed-text the best choice? A mixed-method case study on reading comprehension. AbstractReading is a basic language skill which is essential not only because it develops the literacy skills of the students but because enables them to comprehend and formulate the discourse within a language. Lack of reading, on the other hand, causes impairment of comprehension and affects the academic progress of students greatly. The range of studies suggesting that screen-based reading has a greater effect than primarily paper-based is growing each day. Accordingly, this study aims to set forth the effects of screen-based versus paper-based reading on reading comprehension of English. This is a mixed-method case study, conducted by a group of 30 freshmen, majoring in English Language Teaching undergraduate program at a state-run university. As a tool for data collection, performance tests and written opinion forms were used. Before the study, three different reading texts have been specified. Of these, two were printed, and four of them were digital. Two of the digital text was plain text (pdf); the other two texts were enriched with pictures and links (hypertext). After reading the texts, the participants answered the reading comprehension questions provided by the researcher. Besides, after each application, the written views of the participants have been gathered. In the process of data analysis, performance tests have been scored, and written views are divided into themes. As a result, the success of the application with the highest means score has been identified as the first and fourth reading texts, which were printed. The two lowest success means are identified as containing links to text pictures and hypertext. The findings additionally discovered that students who study texts in print, scored substantially higher at the studying comprehension tests than the students who study the texts digitally. All in all, this study involves several pedagogical implications for reading comprehension in the field of foreign language settings.

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In 2020, institutions had to shift to online education because of the health issues raised globally. Since online education is a complex process, the needs and expectations of instructors also show differences. However, the number of studies focused on English language instructors' job satisfaction is limited. Therefore, this study aims to find out online instructors' job satisfaction related to gender, years of teaching experience and the highest educational degree (bachelor, master's, and doctorate) variables. The sample consists of 218 participants who were selected according to purposive sampling. This study has a quantitative research design. Accordingly, "The Online Instructor Satisfaction Measure-OISM" developed by Bolliger et al. ( 2014) was used to collect quantitative data. Additionally, factor analysis, internal consistency reliability and normality tests, independent sample t-test, and one-way ANOVA tests were conducted for data analysis. The findings revealed that the mean level of online instructors' job satisfaction was 89.04. Besides, there were some differences related to gender and the highest educational degree in subscale level.