No abstract

Many people today are immersed in media similar to fish in water. Electronic devices provide virtually unlimited access to media. Although people consume media during their waking hours, the media they consume might also affect their dreams during sleeping hours. The media often contain violence and sex. On the basis of cognitive neoassociation theory, we predicted that violent and sexual media content would prime related thoughts in semantic memory. In this study, 1,287 Turkish participants completed a survey about their media consumption and their dreams the previous night. We measured the frequency of their media consumption and the violent and sexual content of the media they consumed on a regular basis and on the day before the survey. We also measured whether they had a dream the night before they completed the survey and dream content if they dreamed (51.5% dreamed). We measured whether participants had dreams with violent and sexual content. Similar results were obtained for regular media consumption and for media consumption on the day before the survey. For both measures, media consumption was positively related to dreaming frequency. Media content also influenced dream content. Specifically, participants who consumed violent media tended to have violent dreams, and participants who consumed sexual media tended to have sexual dreams. These results are consistent with cognitive neoassociation theory and extend the theory by showing that it also applies to sleeping hours as well as waking hours. The results also have practical implications. Media can influence our thoughts, even when we are asleep.

Research into second language acquisition lists several factors -social, psychological, cognitive, and affective -as reasons for the failure or low performance of many adult language learners. This present study was conducted to show that in addition to these factors it can also be greatly slowed by mental pollution -any 'contamination of the mind' by various forms of affective visual distractors, ranging in scope from violent or sexually suggestive images to comedic commercial advertisements and coming from a variety of media sources -from which younger learners are mostly protected but older learners are accustomed to encountering on an almost daily basis. In order to test the mental pollution hypothesis, 106 university students participated in the experiment which comprised vocabulary teaching along with two different treatments: mental pollutants being the first and free class time with relaxing music in the background comprising the second. The Equivalent Materials, Pretest, Posttest Design together, including descriptive statistics and paired sample t-tests, were used to analyze the vocabulary scores derived from the two treatments. The findings of the experiment indicate that when learners are exposed to high level of mental pollution, they demonstrate low retention of new vocabulary in a foreign language.

The number of international students in Turkey has steadily increased in recent years. As they come from different geographical locations, their successful adaptation to a medium-sized country in-between three continents is of great interest. This study was conducted to investigate international students’ perceptions of their Turkish experience. After an interview with 9 international students, a 46-item questionnaire was developed and given to 421 students; of these, 319 students from 61 countries returned complete forms. Responses were generally positive, although some difficulties according to gender, religion or age were reported. Another 12 students’ written comments were compared with quantitative data. Implications are suggested as well as directions for further research.

This exploratory study examines book circulation patterns among undergraduate university students at an English-language University in Istanbul, Turkey, in order to investigate the relationship between students’ academic achievement and discipline of study, gender and book borrowing habits. Overall, this study supports the important role of the academic library’s print book collection in supporting and contributing to student success and demonstrates a significant positive correlation between undergraduate students’ level of academic achievement and the number of books they borrowed from the university library. This positive correlation was found for students in all faculties and fields of study, but was strongest for students studying qualitative disciplines and was particularly strong for students enrolled in English as a foreign language programmes.