This paper aims to analyze the effects of video use as an audio visual material as warm-up activity on students' motivation and participation in Aviation English courses at high school level in the viewpoint of English instructors. This paper is based on a qualitative study design in which focus group interview is used as the data collection procedure. The participants of the focus group interview are four instructors teaching Aviation English, teaching 10th graders in a state high school. It is a fact that the use of video like the other audio visual aids is a proper ice breaker and motivation tool for teenagers in today's modern world of technology. According to the analysis of the data collected by focus group interview, the findings, revealing the positive effect of video use on students' motivation and participation, are categorized and discussed within the scope of the study.

This study aims to present high school students" perception of "English" through the impressions and images and the effect of these perceptions on their motivation in learning English. This qualitative study is based on the data about students" metaphors and the focus group interview to determine their effect on the students" motivation. The research group for metaphors consists of 128 high school students from four different grades. 79 metaphors were collected and grouped under 12 categories. In addition, two different focus group interviews are held with 7 students having negative and positive perspectives to determine the effect of these perceptions on students" motivation in learning English. According to the analysis of the data from focus group interviews, students mostly perceive "English" as a target language to learn rather than a foreign language, spoken by a definite society or belonging to a culture. The results of metaphor study also indicate that the students regarding "English" positively tend to have a higher participation and motivation in comparison to the students having negative perceptions.Keywords: culture, English, learning, metaphor, perception Introduction Culture and LanguageWhen "culture of a society" is considered, one of the first concepts that comes to mind is "language". Since language can be accepted to be the common instrument to convey meaning through communication, it is an inseparable part of culture. In addition, all human history, there existed lots of languages and cultures, conveyed beneath or via these languages. According to Bennett (1993:9) learning a language without its culture is a recipe for becoming "a fluent fool and a fluent fool is someone who speaks a foreign language well, but does not understand the social or philosophical content of that language. When the interrelation in between these two inseparable concepts is taken into consideration, it can be said that culture is embedded in language. Hence, great importance should be placed on the teaching of culture in the language classroom. Politzer (1959:99) argues that when a language is taught as a separate entity from its culture, it turns out to be a mere group of meaningless symbols which are too complicated for the learners to elicit any meaning from. Therefore, while teaching a language without any cultural references or meaning, one may know the language but he/she may not be successful in learning and using the target language due to lack of cultural knowledge or background. Brown (1994:165) describes the relation between language and culture and states that a language is a part of a culture and a culture is a part of a language; the two are intricately interwoven so that one cannot separate the two without losing the significance of either language or culture. The Significance and Purpose of the StudyThe effect of perceptions on the motivation in learning English is regarded as an important problem. For this, what metaphors language about the concept of "English" and why they think like that ...

This paper aims to analyze the effect of Essay Writing Course, given as specific writing skill instruction along with comprehension-based instruction, on the writing skill development of high school students. The paper is based on a quantitative study conducted in true experimental design. According to the Comprehension Hypothesis (Krashen, 1994(Krashen, , 2003, a comprehension-based instruction with an emphasis on reading and listening practice as receptive skills, will eventually lead to students' improvement in writing and speaking as productive skills, and to their overall language development. Besides, specific writing skill instruction and effective writing practices have a proven record of success in enhancing students' writing (Graham, 2018). Within the scope of this study, to determine if there is a meaningful difference in between the writing skill development of the students who take Essay Writing Course and of those who do not take any rhetorical course, apart from the comprehension-based instruction, the first and final writing exam scores and achievement levels of two groups of students are compared by a series of paired sample and independent t-tests, analyzed in SPSS and discussed in the scope of the study. It can be concluded from the results of the analysis that the experimental group, given the Essay Writing Course as writing skill instruction is significantly more successful than the control group, not given any writing skill instruction apart from comprehension oriented instruction. Within the analysis, done in the study, it can be also claimed that Essay Writing Course has a positive impact over the writing skill development of high school students.