Araştırmacı ve Geleceğin Profesyonelleri Olarak İngilizce Öğretmen Adayları

Abstract

This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a larger qualitative and quantitative research study which attempted to unearth pre-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ perceptions of educational research and their own research experiences in their research methodology courses. The participants were 85 fourth-year pre-service EFL teachers who had already completed their compulsory ‘Research Methodology’ and ‘ELT Methodology’ courses in a large state university in Turkey. Data presented in this paper were collected by means of a questionnaire which was developed on the basis of a detailed literature review and the iterative discussions of the questionnaire items by the authors. For each survey item, frequency distributions and means were calculated. The findings revealed that EFL pre-service teachers held positive views about the concept of research and their own research experiences in general. Notwithstanding these positive views, they reported rather lower levels of certainty in relation to the role of research-oriented thinking in their lives, their confidence in themselves as researchers and in their research-related work, changing their research plans and revisiting key issues in their research, their feelings of satisfaction in doing research, the value of their work, and the possibility of their future research accomplishments.