Mobile Assisted Foreign Language Teaching in Turkey

Abstract

In Turkey, Mobile phones are recent phenomenon for education and are seriously discussed. The discussions are related to whether mobiles are opportunity or threat. For the ones seeing it as an opportunity, mobiles are among the basic needs for today’s world. For the others it is an addictive object. Meanwhile mobiles have already entered the classes. While the educators have leant to this issue curiously and suspiciously, studies are far behind dealing with it. Pedagogical potential of mobiles is still ambiguous. Despite this, nowadays in which information technology is penetrating to life, education should be aware towards information technology so as to sustain the claim of preparing individuals to this life. Besides, the studies show mobiles are assistive especially for foreign language education. So, cognitive and affective assisting of mobiles is worth studying. This study aims to determine students’ vision upon regarding benefiting from mobile education. It was conducted in Malatya and Elazığ in the academic year of 2013-2014 with the participation of 289 state school students. Data, obtained through questionnaire and analyzed in SPSS, indicated mobiles entered the classroom in ‘silent mode’ and students couldn’t benefit from pedagogical potential of mobiles sufficiently. Students perceive mobiles as primary communication tool rather than a pedagogical item; however, they lean to mobile education. These findings indicate that pedagogical potential of mobiles and information technology hasn’t reflected on secondary school curriculum. This situation prevents the claim of Turkey being an information and technology society.

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Author Information
Burhan Akpinar, Fırat University, Turkey
Veli Batdı, Fırat University, Turkey Çetin Tan, Siirt University, Turkey
Mehmet Porgalı, Fırat University, Turkey
Ayşenur Kuloğlu, Fırat University, Turkey

• Category: Languages education and applied linguistics (ESL/TESL/TEFL)

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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