Papers by Yunus Emre AKBANA
Humanising Language Teaching, 2024
Derya Akbana, that is me, an English language teacher. I have gained experience of sixteen years ... more Derya Akbana, that is me, an English language teacher. I have gained experience of sixteen years in teaching English to students from preschool to high-school levels in di!erent regions in Türkiye. Now, I am teaching at a public primary school in Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye.
Journal of Peace Education
English has long been accepted as lingua franca (ELF) to share values, beliefs and opinions. ELF ... more English has long been accepted as lingua franca (ELF) to share values, beliefs and opinions. ELF can be interrelated with the paradigms of Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT), English as an International Language (EIL) and English as Medium of Instruction (EMI). Textbooks should present content covering global issues (GIs), leading to a better understanding of the spread of English and its connection with globalization where peace education (PE) should be built on. English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers usually feel under pressure to follow textbooks in English prep-programs in Turkey. Therefore, the extent that EFL textbooks offer GIs is crucial for developing learners’ understanding of PE beyond national boundaries. Although relevant literature has well documented the place of GIs in language teaching and paucity of research on PE in language education, EFL textbooks have remained under-researched. For this reason, a comprehensive checklist of GIs was used to examine a five-level series of coursebooks (A1-C1). Data analysis showed that three lower-level coursebooks employed less GIs than those with higher-levels. Issues ranged from environment to health, whilst specific content for PE appeared moderately. Several implications are made for a meaningful match of GIs and GELT, EIL, EMI and EFL teaching with Language of Peace Approach.
Abstract Book, 2023
Digitization of teaching materials dates back to the late quarter of the 20th century after the i... more Digitization of teaching materials dates back to the late quarter of the 20th century after the introduction of computers to the classrooms in the 1950s. The materials in concern were initially digitized by encoding existential (1) and non-existential (0) educational computer meta-data. In the case of language education, it was not until 2000s that traditional language classes were digitalized through self-access centers and iTools, subsequently. Today, following BYOD (bring your own device) trend, many students have the opportunity to use a variety of personal devices in language classrooms. Not surprisingly, approaches to language education with more focus on digitalization have gained popularity especially with the growing integration of technology into language curricula and language classrooms in recent years. They are capable of converting local classrooms which are mostly characterized by traditional principles of education into global learning settings with more active engagement of both teachers and learners. As a matter of fact, the online modalities may now stand for leverage points reaching to planetary boundaries. This has truly led to the glocalization trends with the digitalization of language education and teaching. However, studies focusing on digitalizing language education and teaching are slightly scarce though such a trend follows a rapid transformation. Hence, this particular study is intended to call attention to such studies, by presenting an analysis of publications from Elsevier’s Scopus database. The research data were gathered by document analysis and exposed to bibliometric analysis. The search string on the database was restricted to ‘digitalization’, ‘language teaching’ and ‘language education’. The results were obtained from the Scopus overrunning analysis results and exposed to VOSviewer to gain deeper insights. The accessed publications consist of 1100 articles, 86 books, 151 book chapters, 84 conference proceedings, 9 editorial letters, 2 notes and 63 review studies. The gained results show that most of the studies have origin mostly in Russia, Germany, the UK and the USA, respectively, and that Germany and the UK attract the most citations. The analysis results reveal that the studies were published between 2004 and 2023; showing a growing trend in the last three years that 2022, 2023 (between January and August though) and 2021 marked the highest number of publications, respectively. Also, the analysis results indicate that the co-occurrence of author keywords are ‘higher education’, ‘digitalization’ and ‘Covid-19’. The study concludes with remarks on the call for more studies in various geographical areas, emphasizing Türkiye. In addition to this, it offers several implications for various stakeholders including teacher trainers, curriculum designers, policymakers, teachers and other practitioners in the field of language education.
Keywords: Bibliometric analysis, Digitalization, Language Learning, Language Teaching, Scopus.
TEZ8587Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- Çukurova Üniversitesi, Adana, 2011.Kaynakça (s. 119-127) var.xv, 13... more TEZ8587Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- Çukurova Üniversitesi, Adana, 2011.Kaynakça (s. 119-127) var.xv, 134 s. : tablo ; 29 cm.Granger (2009) considers the place of learner corpus (LC) studies at the crossroads of four language research areas: corpus linguistics, linguistic theory, second language acquisition and foreign language teaching (p. 13). Granger also stresses the significance of learner corpus in the field: 'using main principles, tools and methods from corpus linguistics, it aims to provide improved descriptions of learner language used for a wide range of purposes in foreign/second language acquisition research and also to improve foreign language teaching' (2002, p. 4). So, researchers can utilize the learner corpus in their interest of research areas. In examining various variables that could affect English interlanguage, ""researchers commonly use International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), which contributes to language research areas with the abundance o...
Participatory Educational Research
Teacher professional development is to be continuous to ensure its sustainability, indicating the... more Teacher professional development is to be continuous to ensure its sustainability, indicating the need for unceasing scaffolding provided to the teacher for their professional learning staring with the pre-service teacher education program and going on till their retirement. In-service teacher professional development programs/activities could lead to anticipated outcomes, improved teaching and learning performance, providing they are structured around the real professional development needs of the teacher rather than the ones determined by professional development units of ministries of education or school administration. That is to say, bottom-up professional development activities are more likely to generate desired impacts than top-down ones. In light of this premise, this explanatory sequential mixed methods study aims to identify the professional development needs of in-service English teachers teaching at Anatolian High Schools in the county of Antakya, Turkey. In addition, t...
EDUCCCON 2022 Digital Competence & STE(A)M Education, 2022
STEAM Education has been gaining popularity among teachers from various fields of teaching and di... more STEAM Education has been gaining popularity among teachers from various fields of teaching and different levels of education. Therefore, this study aims at investigating teachers’ readiness to use STEAM education and to identify their needs for a comprehensive STEAM education training using a case study research design. To achieve this, 110 teachers working in Kahramanmaraş province of Turkey were surveyed through a selection form including a letter of motivation to join the workshop trainings. Among them, 24 teachers of Information Technologies (4), Science (5), Physics (1), Mathematics (4), Music (1), Technology and Design (6) and Foreign Language (3) voluntarily participated in the study. In addition to the teacher selection form, a focus group interview was conducted using an online platform and the resulting data were analyzed through content analysis. Seventeen teachers had teaching experience of 0 to 10 years while the remaining seven teachers had 11-25 years. Seven teachers stated that they had participated in STEAM related activities via different foundations by their own efforts. The findings indicate that the teachers were highly motivated to join a STEAM training and that they mostly wanted to learn about STEAM education and do hands-on activities with their students. Moreover, they wanted to increase their teaching performance with STEAM education and gain new insights by updating their teaching skills towards 21th century skills. The teachers also felt the need to learn content knowledge of fields other than their own expertise. In conclusion, the findings shed light onto the arising need for mastering the basic cross-content knowledge by means of STEAM education, which in turn calls for a well-designed professional development component related to STEAM education.
Eğitimde Kuram ve Uygulama, 2021
Research and publication ethics were followed. In this study, the data were collected before 2020... more Research and publication ethics were followed. In this study, the data were collected before 2020, and voluntary participation of study group was observed during the data collection period.
Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam Üniversitesi Eğitim Dergisi, Dec 31, 2020
Though the inclusion of global issues (GIs)-such as war, health problems, and environmental pollu... more Though the inclusion of global issues (GIs)-such as war, health problems, and environmental pollution-in foreign language teaching materials and contents dates back to few decades ago, its reflections in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching contexts in Turkey have not been investigated sufficiently. Drawn from this local gap the authors decided to conduct this qualitative research at a state university to unfold EFL lecturers' views on integrating GIs into teaching English. The authors obtained the data through a short survey of open-ended questions and follow-up semi-structured interviews. The analysis of the data was conducted through inductive content analysis method. The findings indicate that EFL lecturers have a clear understanding of GIs and they prefer coursebook dependent and independent methods to incorporate GIs in language teaching. Also, they address young adults with at least B1 level of English proficiency at tertiary level to be the best target learner groups for embedding GIs in language teaching. In addition, they prefer mostly speaking and writing skills to incorporate GIs in their teaching with students whose majors could invoke interest. The study ends with several methodological and pedagogical implications for researchers and teachers to incorporate GIs in EFL teaching.
Acta Educationis Generalis, 2022
Introduction: This study aims to explore an under-researched issue; namely, remote teaching anxie... more Introduction: This study aims to explore an under-researched issue; namely, remote teaching anxiety. Methods: This study employed a sequential mixed-methods exploratory design where participants initially reported their remote teaching anxiety sources and then rated each. For the analysis, inductive content analysis and statistical tests were employed. Results: The content analysis revealed two major themes: digitalisation-related concerns and online pedagogy-related concerns. Statistically significant difference was only found between anxiety sources and online teaching experience but not between gender, age, teaching experience, work setting and anxiety sources. Discussion: Several studies (Çoklar, Efilti, Şahin, & Akçay, 2016; Hassan et al., 2019) found digitalisation-related concerns causing stress among teachers; however, remote teaching anxiety remains an underexplored construct (Russell, 2020). Although online pedagogy-related concerns were found to cause teaching anxiety in ...
International Journal of Assessment Tools in Education, 2022
Reading self-efficacy performs a fundamental role in gaining academic achievement in college educ... more Reading self-efficacy performs a fundamental role in gaining academic achievement in college education. Review of the related literature unveils that it needs to be enriched by conducting further research on college students' reading self-efficacy. The paucity of investigations into college students' reading selfefficacy could have a connection with the lack of a comprehensive reading selfefficacy scale targeting exclusively measuring it. For this reason, this study aims at developing and validating a reading self-efficacy scale which could be used to measure college students' reading self-efficacy. The data was collected from three distinct groups consisting of a total of 430 students of the departments of English language teaching and English language and literature studying at state universities in Turkey. The findings obtained from exploratory factor analysis revealed that the scale had a unidimensional structure and the ones provided by confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the structure of the scale. The developed and validated 16-item reading self-efficacy scale could prompt the university teachers of reading to undertake studies with an eye to examining their students' reading self-efficacy.
Journal of Language and Education, 2021
Education has been offered in the form of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) worldwide since March 2... more Education has been offered in the form of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) worldwide since March 2020 due to the spread of Covid-19. This compulsory transition has often been marked by disregard of the technological infrastructure of educational institutions, digital literacy skills of teachers and students, and their access to technology. A growing body of research discusses challenges faced in ERT; however, further studies are needed to arrive at validated conclusions to inform formal language teaching and learning. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study aimed at adding context-dependent knowledge to the literature by reporting on the case of university students majoring in language teaching. For this reason, the perceptions of a group of 67 pre-service English language teachers on ERT practices at a Turkish state university were explored. Data were collected through an interview form developed by the researchers and a focus group interview. The data were analysed inductivel...
Acta Educationis Generalis, 2022
Introduction: This study aims to explore an under-researched issue; namely, remote teaching anxie... more Introduction: This study aims to explore an under-researched issue; namely, remote teaching anxiety. Methods: This study employed a sequential mixed-methods exploratory design where participants initially reported their remote teaching anxiety sources and then rated each. For the analysis, inductive content analysis and statistical tests were employed. Results: The content analysis revealed two major themes: digitalisationrelated concerns and online pedagogy-related concerns. Statistically significant difference was only found between anxiety sources and online teaching experience but not between gender, age, teaching experience, work setting and anxiety sources. Discussion: Several studies (Çoklar, Efilti, Şahin, & Akçay, 2016; Hassan et al., 2019) found digitalisation-related concerns causing stress among teachers; however, remote teaching anxiety remains an underexplored construct (Russell, 2020). Although online pedagogy-related concerns were found to cause teaching anxiety in our study, a recent study (Lazarevic & Bentz, 2020) found using technology helpful to decrease anxiety. Limitations: The data were limited to the views of 96 EFL teachers in the Turkish context. Conclusion: We can conclude that limited experience with remote teaching can contribute to higher anxiety among EFL teachers. Additionally, this research can contribute to the relevant literature with several implications on the future of language education.
Development and Validation of a Reading Self-Efficacy Scale, 2022
Reading self-efficacy performs a fundamental role in gaining academic achievement in college educ... more Reading self-efficacy performs a fundamental role in gaining academic achievement in college education. Review of the related literature unveils that it needs to be enriched by conducting further research on college students' reading self-efficacy. The paucity of investigations into college students' reading selfefficacy could have a connection with the lack of a comprehensive reading selfefficacy scale targeting exclusively measuring it. For this reason, this study aims at developing and validating a reading self-efficacy scale which could be used to measure college students' reading self-efficacy. The data was collected from three distinct groups consisting of a total of 430 students of the departments of English language teaching and English language and literature studying at state universities in Turkey. The findings obtained from exploratory factor analysis revealed that the scale had a unidimensional structure and the ones provided by confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the structure of the scale. The developed and validated 16-item reading self-efficacy scale could prompt the university teachers of reading to undertake studies with an eye to examining their students' reading self-efficacy.
Corpus linguistics has vastly developed and been addressed to mirror the frequencies of naturally... more Corpus linguistics has vastly developed and been addressed to mirror the frequencies of naturally occurring lexical items not only in English but also in many other languages. Learner corpora represent the written interlanguage performance of L2 or foreign language users coming from different mother tongue backgrounds. International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) is the first computer learner corpus comprised of the argumentative essays written by advanced learners of English representing 16 different mother tongue backgrounds. In this study Turkish subcorpus of ICLE (TICLE) which represents the written performances of Turkish users of English has been analyzed and ten most frequent words have been listed. TICLE is preferred to be compared with a comparable reference corpus, Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). The results of this data-driven study have been discussed on the basis of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA); firstly, the top ten high-frequency words ...
Dealing with Emergency Remote Teaching: The Case of Pre-service English Language Teachers in Turkey, 2021
Education has been offered in the form of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) worldwide since March 2... more Education has been offered in the form of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) worldwide since March 2020 due to the spread of Covid-19. This compulsory transition has often been marked by disregard of the technological infrastructure of educational institutions, digital literacy skills of teachers and students, and their access to technology. A growing body of research discusses challenges faced in ERT; however, further studies are needed to arrive at validated conclusions to inform formal language teaching and learning. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study aimed at adding context-dependent knowledge to the literature by reporting on the case of university students majoring in language teaching. For this reason, the perceptions of a group of 67 pre-service English language teachers on ERT practices at a Turkish state university were explored. Data were collected through an interview form developed by the researchers and a focus group interview. The data were analysed inductively using content analysis. Half of the participants reported that specific skills were conducive to doing tasks in an ERT environment. They not only reported a variety of challenges related to the perceived ineffectiveness of learning, technical insufficiency, and inappropriateness of the learning environment, but also acknowledged contributions to their personal and academic development. That is, they found ERT flexible, time-saving, and favourable for learners who felt more confident in virtual classrooms, and some considered ERT as an opportunity for self-actualisation. Nonetheless, the majority favoured face-to-face education over ERT appreciating the enhanced effectiveness of in-class education. In sum, the study emphasises the need to support learners and teachers by providing instructions and strategies on how to organise learning and teaching. Moreover, schools, policy makers, and governmental authorities may need to provide ERT-tailored programmes and an infrastructure in terms of technical equipment to meet the requirements of education delivered in ERT and to realise effective language learning in virtual environments. Broadening the knowledge base concerning ERT in language teacher education, this study advises to address drawbacks of ERT and to take advantage of its opportunities.
Dil Eğitimi ve Araştırmaları Dergisi
This quasi-experimental study explored the impact of a seven-week intervention in reciprocal teac... more This quasi-experimental study explored the impact of a seven-week intervention in reciprocal teaching (RT) on improving pre-service English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers' (PSEFLTs) reading comprehension skills. The experimental group (N = 56) were subjected to an intervention designed to help them understand and apply the steps in RT while the control group (N = 53) attended to reading classes taught conventionally. Data was collected from a pre-reading test administered prior to the commencement and a post-reading test administered following the intervention, and a semi-structured interview. The findings revealed there was no statistically significant difference in experimental and control group participants' reading comprehension skills in the pre-reading test; nevertheless, the experimental group outperformed the control group in the post-reading test. Analysis of the qualitative data demonstrated the PSEFLTs viewed the RT intervention as effective in developing their reading comprehension skills and would implement it in their future teaching.
The Impact of Reciprocal Teaching on Pre-Service English-as-a-Foreign-Language Teachers’ Reading Comprehension Skills, 2021
This quasi-experimental study explored the impact of a seven-week intervention in reciprocal teac... more This quasi-experimental study explored the impact of a seven-week intervention in reciprocal teaching (RT) on improving pre-service English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers' (PSEFLTs) reading comprehension skills. The experimental group (N = 56) were subjected to an intervention designed to help them understand and apply the steps in RT while the control group (N = 53) attended to reading classes taught conventionally. Data was collected from a pre-reading test administered prior to the commencement and a post-reading test administered following the intervention, and a semi-structured interview. The findings revealed there was no statistically significant difference in experimental and control group participants' reading comprehension skills in the pre-reading test; nevertheless, the experimental group outperformed the control group in the post-reading test. Analysis of the qualitative data demonstrated the PSEFLTs viewed the RT intervention as effective in developing their reading comprehension skills and would implement it in their future teaching.
Turkish Journal of Education
This study aims at tracing the effects of emergency remote education due to Covid-19 on foreign/s... more This study aims at tracing the effects of emergency remote education due to Covid-19 on foreign/second language teaching documented in research papers and reports. Employing document analysis, it identifies the research contexts and key findings reported in the studies published between 1 January and 28 October 2020. The findings indicate that a significant number of publications consist of reports presented by practitioners, i.e. schools, governmental authorities and educational foundations, and that the tertiary level is the most frequently covered context in the papers. The analysed publications report slightly more Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT)-driven affordances for teachers than constraints and suggest that both teachers and students are able to turn challenges of ERT into affordances when they receive sufficient support from governmental authorities, schools or peers and benefit from already acquired digital skills and technical infrastructure available. The findings also indicate a gap of research based on classroom data, which would more effectively contribute to an understanding of the challenges and affordances of ERT in language teaching.
Eğitimde Kuram ve Uygulama [Journal of Theory and Practice in Education], 2021
The study employs a qualitative research methodology incorporating Form Focused Instructional Des... more The study employs a qualitative research methodology incorporating Form Focused Instructional Design (FFID) with 20 young adult university students of English and an EFL university teacher. The FFID was aided with the Ellis’ (1998, 2016) instructional stages of input, intake, output, feedback, and the stages were backed up with uptake as an addition. The study targets dwelling on the participants’ views towards FFID via learner and teacher journals and semi-structured interviews. Through an inductive content analysis, the triangulated findings indicated the benefits of FFID available both to the learners and the teacher. To list a few, FFID afforded opportunities for learners to make discoveries, engage with learning the language, promote learning and show other developments in affective, cognitive and professional dimensions. FFID also assisted the teacher to be motivated and get engaged within the process more actively. On the other hand, FFID raised limited negative issues such as the inhibitors to engage in tasks and lack of motivation and attention due to affective factors and conditions. However, these factors and conditions are identified as significantly important for the teacher to consider students’ achievement and development. Accordingly, the study concludes with several methodological and pedagogical implications to run FFID in EFL settings.
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Papers by Yunus Emre AKBANA
Keywords: Bibliometric analysis, Digitalization, Language Learning, Language Teaching, Scopus.
Keywords: Bibliometric analysis, Digitalization, Language Learning, Language Teaching, Scopus.
Evermore researchers issue directives for what constitutes 'digitalization' and 'language teaching'. This book is dedicated to providing a resource and a guide for understanding how technology can be used for English language teaching. Therefore, it aims to present hands-on applications and web-sources that can be useful for language teachers from primary to tertiary settings. Such a design can also be useful for teacher education programs, language policy makers, curriculum developers and other practitioners who would like to extend their professional knowledge. To this end, this book offers insights into what would constitute more deliberative ways to teach English through digitalization. To put forward more ideas for digitalizing supportive materials, each chapter offers one sample lesson plan on the focus of the chapter; namely, teaching reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation.