ELT teachers working in underprivileged districts of Turkey and their perspective of continuous professional development opportunities

The purpose of this research is to enquire the ELT teachers’ perspective of continuous professional development under restricted conditions they are obliged to teach English. Therefore, 20 EFL teachers who have been working at different state schools in the remote villages of southeast region of Turkey were selected as the participants of the inquiry. The data were collected in two different processes. First, all the teachers in the study were interviewed to answer the questions in the first part of the survey individually. Then, randomly selected 12 teachers were separated into two groups for online focus-group discussions, which were held in a semi-structured context by leading questions adapted from Brown (2013). Data collection processes were audio-recorded, and the qualitative data obtained from interviews and focus group discussions were coded and clustered to form specific themes. The results of the research revealed that teachers working in underprivileged districts of Turkey: (a) believe the crucial contribution of professional development activities for teacher quality and/or student achievement (b) have very limited opportunities and options for sustained professional development, and (c) think that the times allocated for professional development activities should be increased. Moreover, teachers these teachers (d) hope to take place in the planning phase of professional development activities, and (e) are dissatisfied with unfair financial situation. Upon the analysis of these items stated in the results, male teachers were found to focus on more general ideas compared to female teachers (item a and item b). On the other hand, the results indicated that female teachers focused on specific ideas statistically more often compared to male teachers (item c and item d). The teachers did not show statistical gender difference in terms of financial limitations (item e). The results of the research might be generalized to the similar contexts in other underprivileged districts, and similar researches might be conducted with teachers of other fields in order to reach results that are more generalizable

A Contrastive Analysis of English and Turkish Plural Markers

This morphophonemic study aims to analyze pluralization processes for common nouns in English and native Turkish. To achieve this, a contrastive analysis focusing on English and Turkish plural markers from a structuralist point of view is taken. The results of the analysis reveal the differences and similarities between two languages in terms of plural markers. As for the differences, it is found that English and Turkish differ in regular and irregular plural forms as well as active role of consonants and vowels for pluralization process. Similarities for plural markers include focusing on the final sound of nouns, relying on distinctive features of sounds, employing allomorphs and using plural markers as suffixes for both languages to a varying degree. The findings of this study might help learners of English and Turkish by revealing the differences and similarities in both languages