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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 ...

In the present study, views of lecturers teaching in the field of Curriculum and Instruction for the faculties of education are analyzed considering that they have experience and are in charge of teacher training mission in the Turkish education system. Thus, the study aims to investigate the views of faculty members on their own constructivist views and their practice in education faculties and general practice in the national education. The survey model is used in the study and the population of the research includes the teaching members in the field of curriculum and instruction in Turkey. There are 340 teaching members in this field in Turkey and they are not many in number. Thus, the entire population had to be reached. However, the number of faculty members that can be reached has been 112, corresponding to 33% of the population. As the data collection tool, a classification type of control list (questionnaire) consisting of 26 items related to constructivism practice was used. Since the population is wide and includes all the faculty members in the field around the country, the advantages of using online software was taken into consideration and the data was collected online as access was easy by the participants willing to respond. When findings obtained are discussed with all its components, it is seen that faculty members are not able to fully implement constructivism but trying to include some characteristics of it. In addition, according, the practice of constructivism continues to diminish in the other fields other than the field of Curriculum and Instruction field. In other words, the effect of constructivism on other faculty members and other faculty applications other than the department and on general practices of national education continues to decrease.

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