Experiential Learning
Hypothesis
Turkish students start studying English at exceptionally early ages. It became the policy of government to start English Language Teaching from early ages in 1999.English has been one of the most prominent subjects at kindergartens and private schools so far. However, when we examine closely, it is not so hard to conclude that this painful, expensive, and uncontrolled process has resulted in low oral and written proficiency. Students need to spend a year studying English in preparatory classes of universities to be able to reach high language proficiency (B2 level) due to this reason. The recent survey held by EF language schools between 45 countries show that Turkey is the 44th country after Kazakhstan. Although they say there is no guarantee that this particular proficiency score corresponds to the academic and economic goals set by an individual nation, the EF EPI does provide uniquely standardized comparison and governments alike when trying to evaluate the effectiveness of their English language policies as compared to neighbours (EF EPI English Proficiency Index, 2011). This case leads many new generation teachers of English to think about the problem more carefully and deeply.
Although there have been a vast amount of teacher trainings, seminars, conferences, modern materials of well-known book dealers, and global syllabuses, methods, techniques and fast development of technology, it is not surprising to observe that even students, who go to universities to pursue academic careers generally fail to build a successful oral and written communication.
There might be many serious problems, which can be the reasons of this failure but we can very unwillingly assert that the main problem could be the most disregarded one, which is the lack of motivation results in aimlessness. In many Turkish EFL classrooms the lack of motivation and goal are in the core of the trouble. In another saying, the sequence of the problem is the same of Tomlinson’s
Turkish students start studying English at exceptionally early ages. It became the policy of government to start English Language Teaching from early ages in 1999.English has been one of the most prominent subjects at kindergartens and private schools so far. However, when we examine closely, it is not so hard to conclude that this painful, expensive, and uncontrolled process has resulted in low oral and written proficiency. Students need to spend a year studying English in preparatory classes of universities to be able to reach high language proficiency (B2 level) due to this reason. The recent survey held by EF language schools between 45 countries show that Turkey is the 44th country after Kazakhstan. Although they say there is no guarantee that this particular proficiency score corresponds to the academic and economic goals set by an individual nation, the EF EPI does provide uniquely standardized comparison and governments alike when trying to evaluate the effectiveness of their English language policies as compared to neighbours (EF EPI English Proficiency Index, 2011). This case leads many new generation teachers of English to think about the problem more carefully and deeply.
Although there have been a vast amount of teacher trainings, seminars, conferences, modern materials of well-known book dealers, and global syllabuses, methods, techniques and fast development of technology, it is not surprising to observe that even students, who go to universities to pursue academic careers generally fail to build a successful oral and written communication.
There might be many serious problems, which can be the reasons of this failure but we can very unwillingly assert that the main problem could be the most disregarded one, which is the lack of motivation results in aimlessness. In many Turkish EFL classrooms the lack of motivation and goal are in the core of the trouble. In another saying, the sequence of the problem is the same of Tomlinson’s