Turkish Prospective Teachers’ Perceptions of Social Network Sites on Their Professional Development

Former studies investigate how Web 2.0 technologies influence learning and found out that Social Network Sites such as Facebook and Myspace provide interactive environments where students have chance to communicate on their courses outside the classroom. More recent studies based on Facebook emphasized its usage on informal learning by pointing out that Facebook enables students benefit from each others’ learning experiences. The purpose of this study was to investigate Turkish prospective EFL teachers’ perceptions of Facebook on their professional development. This study was conducted on 29 EFL freshman students in a state university in Turkey. Data were collected with a Likert type questionnaire and results were analyzed using SPSS 16.0 statistics program. According to the frequency statistics, Turkish prospective EFL teachers were found to perceive Facebook as a collaborative environment enabling them to share both information about their courses and professional knowledge. Keywords: Web 2.0, Facebook, Professional development, Prospective EFL teacher

The Perception of Prospective English Language Teachers on Guided Peer Feedback Regarding Their Writing Skills

The main goal of education is to create autonomous lifelong learners who have the ability to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for their future life. Constructivist theories of learning, especially current popular approach, communicative language teaching recommends creating cooperative learning situations in all kinds of educational context in order to achieve this goal. To empower students as self-regulated and collaborative learners, peer feedback is increasingly applied in process approach to teach writing. Thus, the circumstances under which peer feedback is beneficial for students’improvements are worth to be investigated in detail. Especially, the students’ emotional state can mediate the impact of peer feedback on their performance. The results obtained may be informative for EFL writing teachers in terms of the aspects to take into account when implementing feedback in order to foster the development of students’ positive attitudes toward it. Keywords: Peer feedback, Writing skill, Cooperative learning

Sovyet dönemi sonrası Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'nin merkez Avrasya politikasının evrimi ve Hazar petrolünün jeopolitiği.

The objective of this thesis is to analyze the US Central Eurasia Policy in the period between 1991 and 2006. Within this context, the purpose is to figure out the foremost motive behind the US’s strategic engagement in the region with a due regard to changing geopolitical context with the demise of the Soviet Union. The main argument rests upon the assumption that the US regional policy is primarily motivated by geopolitical imperatives as the Central Eurasian region becomes the primary springboard for the attainment of global supremacy. Within this respect, energy is only one aspect of the ongoing geopolitical competition. That the geopolitical priorities are preponderant to geoeconomic interests are basically observed by the intense geostrategic struggle over dominating the prospective oil and gas pipelines from the region. Eventually, within the confines of this thesis, it is deduced that the ultimate parameters of the geopolitical struggle, the framework of which was specified by the United States, have revealed themselves more explicitly in the aftermath of the September 11, which only reinforced the strategic significance of Central Eurasia in coping with the new geopolitical fault lines of the 21st century. Within this regard, Central Eurasia has transformed into an implicit geostrategic standoff between the United States on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other. Accordingly, the fact that the United States could by no means remain complacent about the fate of Central Eurasia against such a backdrop of high geopolitical fluidity in the overall Eurasian continent is most relevant to the possibility of rising potential aspirants for global dominance that would challenge the United States in the long term.M.S. - Master of Scienc