No abstract

In Turkey, first-year preservice English teachers learn L2 writing in at least two compulsory courses throughout their undergraduate ELT programs. This study, conducted in this context, intends to investigate preservice English teachers' perceptions about L2 undergraduate writing difficulty and their causal attributions for these difficulties. It also aims to examine the relationship between density/variety of perceived difficulty in L2 writing and writing scores. For these purposes, the case study approach was adopted. In order to answer three research questions, in-depth interviews were conducted with 26 first-year preservice teachers studying in the ELT department of a Turkish state university, and their firstmidterm writing scores were collected. According to the findings, firstly all the interviewees agreed that students in the program had difficulty while writing in L2. Secondly, the correlational analyses revealed a negative relationship between density/variety of perceived L2 writing difficulty and writing scores. Lastly, three main sources of perceived writing difficulty were identified: 1) student-based sources, 2) educational practices and tendencies and 3) lecturer-based sources. After all, the related inferences, discussions and suggestions about learning and teaching of L2 writing have been addressed based on the current findings.

Research in literature reports the importance of L2 vocabulary and syntactic knowledge on the learners' reading comprehension. In this regard, the current study investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge that is disunited into depth and breadth dimensions and syntactic knowledge in the reading comprehension scores of an advanced cohort of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. In particular, this study examined the relationship of vocabulary knowledge (with its two dimensions) and syntactic knowledge with reading comprehension scores of 30 Turkish EFL learners and the extent to which these knowledge types explain the variance in reading comprehension scores. Measures of vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension were used. The data analysis procedure included the descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlations and multiple regression analysis. The results showed that the depth of vocabulary knowledge predicts the L2 reading comprehension the best when the effect of vocabulary size and syntactic knowledge is controlled. These findings are discussed at the end of the study with future research suggestions and limitations.