Academic Literacy Skills of Instructors Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Academic literacy covers reading, understanding, and evaluating academic studies that form the basis of science. It is one of the essential qualifications of the 21st century. In the education and training process, teachers are expected to have this skill in particular because teachers with academic qualifications integrate academic literacy skills with their professions according to the necessities of the time to improve themselves and present this to the learners during the teaching process. In this context, this study aims to determine Turkish instructors’ academic competence levels and examine them according to different variables. In the research using the survey model, «The Academic Literacy Scale» prepared by Demir and Deniz (2020) was used as a data collection tool. This scale, which consists of three factors: academic disposition, research process, and information use, consists of 28 items in total. The study determined that academic literacy skills were at a “high” level when the average score of the Turkish instructors from the overall scale was taken into account. When the academic literacy skills of Turkish instructors were examined in terms of various variables, no significant difference was found with the gender variable in the scale. Another divergence was found between the educational status variable and all the sub-dimensions of the scale, like research process, information use, and academic tendency. In addition, the graduated department variable differs with the research process and information use dimensions of the scale. There is also a significant difference between the variable of receiving education to increase academic literacy skills and the research process sub-dimension of the scale. Last but not least, a considerable distinction was discovered between all scale sub-dimensions and the overall scale in relation to the status of having knowledge of scientific research methodologies and having published academic work.