Turkish EFL Teacher Candidates’ Early Teacher Identity

The topic of teacher identity has lately begun to be associated with general notions of teacher training and development. Becoming an expert through gradual learning and teaching also calls for awareness of self-identity as a teacher when considering the standards of the teaching profession. Language teachers start to develop their identity as a teacher during their higher education at language teaching departments, and the development in concern constitutes the basis of their roles in the teaching process. With that in mind, the current study was motivated to investigate perceptions of Turkish EFL teacher candidates on their early teacher identity. The participants of the study were senior students enrolled in two English Language Teaching Departments at a state university and a private university in Turkey. Data were collected from the students in concern through a Likert-type questionnaire during their teaching practicum. The research findings indicated that they held a high level of early teacher identity scores, and that they somehow significantly differed in their perceptions about early teacher identity with regard to gender and the attended university type

A Corpus-based Study on the Use of MAKE by Turkish EFL Learners

This study examines the lexical and grammatical use of a high frequency verb ‘MAKE’ by Turkish EFL learners. Major goals are to investigate whether Turkish learners of English use MAKE appropriately in their argumentative essays and to see to what extent L1 transfer plays a role in such usage and to what extent different learner groups from  different L1s share common interlanguage features. Overuse, underuse and misuse of MAKE by learners and native speakers gathered by frequency calculations from native speakers’ and two learners’ corpora and comparison of them among each other constitute the quantitative backbone of the research. Results showed that Turkish learners have difficulty in the use of MAKE to a certain degree. Consequently, learners should be made aware of especially delexical and grammatical patterning of high frequency verbs in English such as MAKE and they should also be shown the difference in the use of these verbs between their L1 and L2