Aycan Demir AYAZ, Sinem OZKARDAS, Tuba OZTURAN

Challenges of English Language Teaching in High Schools in Turkey and Possible Suggestions to Overcome Them

The English language curriculum prepared by the Ministry of National Education for high schools inTurkey seems to be satisfactory in theory, but the related studies about the attitudes of actualpractitioners towards English classes in high schools are not detailed and comprehensive enough. Thisstudy aims to fill this gap. To do so, qualitative research was conducted with 13 English languageteachers and 55 high school students from different parts of Turkey. They were asked for their opinions,applications, observations, and challenges of the English language teaching system in their high schoolsand some suggestions for the problematic issues were requested from them via open-ended questions.The data were analyzed descriptively; the results showed that most teachers are not satisfied with thecoursebooks, crowded classes, quite limited class hours, and unmotivated students. Their mainsuggestions cover the privatization of education, having language libraries, labs, speaking clubs, andmore lesson hours for English and decreasing the number of students in each classroom. Additionally,teachers want to attend international seminars to become aware of the latest methods/sources. Studentshave some valuable suggestions for the improvements as well. Nearly all of the students are unhappyabout the coursebooks; thus, they suggest them to be revised. They also want to join internationalprojects and improve their language skills. As a result of the study, suggestions covering many issueslike coursebooks, assessment, teacher training, and European projects were proposed with an aim todiminish the gap between theories and applications in real classes.© 2019 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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