International Office

A variety of factors might impact interpersonal interaction between instructors and students in an online course. This study seeks to explore the opinions and attitudes of six EFL instructors working at various universities in Turkey regarding the factors they believe increase interaction in their online courses and to contribute to the pertinent literature. Within the scope of collaborative research, the use of purposeful sampling technique and semi-structured interviews with the participants provided the best opportunity to describe the attitudes and opinions of these instructors who were assigned to teach online in an emergency remote teaching environment due to the coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19. The end result includes a variety of factors and strategies influencing interaction that can be used by novice and experienced online instructors aiming to influence interpersonal interaction in their online courses. While all the participants expressed the need to provide higher quality interactions during the online courses, the obstacles they face in their efforts to reach the desired level of interaction were the main agenda of the interviews. They discussed the role of course structure factors, environment and media effects, feedback and assessment techniques, and discourse facilitators, which constituted the main themes that were categorized into codes emerging from the interview data.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) has been a common subject for different educational purposes from the planning of teaching process to testing and assessment practices. The term "TPACK-Practical" refers to a framework based on teachers' knowledge and experience that takes into account the theoretically described TPACK model's structure and the process of teaching practice. The present study aims to describe the nature of technology integration among Turkish EFL in-service instructors by exploring their skill levels to implement their TPACK-Practical in their classroom practices, and by explaining the relationships between these skill levels and some demographic variables. The research was conducted in the contexts of the Schools of Foreign Languages at various universities in Turkey at the end of the second term of 2022/2023 academic year. All EFL instructors teaching at the university level are the study's target population; however, the convenience sample chosen for the study on a voluntary basis only included 155 EFL instructors from these schools who responded to the questions on the data collection instrument (TPACK-Practical scale developed by Yeh et al., 2014). To comprehensively understand the participant profile and collect data to analyze the relations between the variables, the participants' demographic characteristics were also considered. The study has a quantitative research design that employs descriptive statistics to describe the demographic information and scale results; and correlation analysis, independent sample t-test, and ANOVA test to explain the relationships between the variables. Results of the study have revealed that EFL instructors generally use their TPACK-Practical skills in classroom applications at a "sufficient" level (at the lowest level in the Assessments area and at the highest level in the Subject Content area), and that demographic variables have no significant effect on their technology integration skills.

A variety of factors might impact interpersonal interaction between instructors and students in an online course. This study seeks to explore the opinions and attitudes of six EFL instructors working at various universities in Turkey regarding the factors they believe increase interaction in their online courses and to contribute to the pertinent literature. Within the scope of collaborative research, the use of purposeful sampling technique and semi-structured interviews with the participants provided the best opportunity to describe the attitudes and opinions of these instructors who were assigned to teach online in an emergency remote teaching environment due to the coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19. The end result includes a variety of factors and strategies influencing interaction that can be used by novice and experienced online instructors aiming to influence interpersonal interaction in their online courses. While all the participants expressed the need to provide higher quality interactions during the online courses, the obstacles they face in their efforts to reach the desired level of interaction were the main agenda of the interviews. They discussed the role of course structure factors, environment and media effects, feedback and assessment techniques, and discourse facilitators, which constituted the main themes that were categorized into codes emerging from the interview data.

Owing to the Covid-19 outbreak, all universities in Türkiye were closed for the spring term of the 2019-2020 academic year and there was a sudden and obligatory shift to distance education. This study aims to investigate the feelings of English instructors assigned to give synchronous online lessons at a university during emergency remote teaching to explore the reasons for their anxiety and whether their feelings and sources of anxiety differ according to age and years of teaching experience. As for the method, a sequential exploratory mixedmethod research design was employed. Initially, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven English instructors, and the data were analyzed through content analysis. Then, a questionnaire was developed based on the findings obtained from the interviews and the relevant literature. Sixty-three English instructors responded to the questionnaire, and SPSS was used to analyze the quantitative data. Both qualitative and quantitative findings indicated that sudden conversion to remote teaching created anxiety, and negative feelings were dominant in the beginning. Sense of inadequacy, lack of interaction opportunities, and fear of not being able to meet students' needs were found to be the major causes for the instructors' concerns. The results obtained from the study may offer clues to improve the effectiveness of synchronous online education and professional development activities for English instructors.