An Evaluation of the Secondary School Intensive Foreign Language Education

Abstract

This study aims to investigate English teachers’, students’ and parents’ opinions about the secondary schools’ intensive foreign language education program in Turkey focusing on four skills, content, learning objectives, teaching/learning process and assessment/evaluation. To this end, instruments consisting of three questionnaires and one academic test were developed by the researcher. These instruments were applied to 305 English teachers, 189 students and 288 parents. Cronbach alpha results were found above 0,80 for all the questionnaires indicating the high reliability of the data collection tools. Descriptive statistics (frequency and mean), Oneway ANOVA and post hoc tests were used to describe and compare the opinions between the groups. The results of this study show that in terms of four skills, teachers, as opposed to students and parents, think that reading and writing skills develop more than listening and speaking skills. Teachers also think that they can partially achieve learning objectives for speaking skills. Regarding the content, teachers state that the content is partially prepared with a focus on communication while students and parents have quite positive opinions. The students and parents expressed partially positive opinions about the intensive foreign language education encouraging hands-on activities during the lesson while teachers think otherwise. Briefly, parents and students have more positive opinions than teachers. Overall, the results of this study show the discrepancy between teachers, students and parents’ thoughts about intensive foreign language education, in which is worth investing.