TURKISH EFL ENGLISH MAJORS` PERCEPTIONS TOWARDS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF “INTRODUCTION TO CORPUS LINGUISTICS” COURSE IN AN ENGLISH DEPARTMENT IN TURKEY

TÜRKİYE`DE İNGİLİZ DİLI VE EDEBİYATİ ÖĞRENİMİ GÖREN VE İNGİLİZCE`Yİ YABANCI DİL OLARAK ÖĞRENEN TÜRK ÖĞRENCİLERİN “DERLEM BİLİMİNE GİRİŞ” DERSİNE KARŞI GELİŞTİRDİKLERİ ALGILAR

Özet

Bu çalışmanın amacı, Türkiye`de İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı öğrenimi gören ve İngilizce`yi yabancı dil olarak öğrenen Türk öğrencilerin "Derlem Bilime Giriş" dersine karşı geliştirdikleri algıları tespit etmektir. Bu dersin seçmeli olarak açılmasını takiben dersin öğrenciler üzerindeki olası etkilerini tespit etmek gereği doğmuştur. Hem nicel ve hemde nitel veriler ile yapılan bu çalışma Türkiye`de ilk kez lisans düzeyinde okutulacak olan "Derlem Bilime Giriş" dersinin bu dersi alan öğrenciler üzerindeki etkisini ortaya çıkarmayı amaçlamıştır. 2016-2017 güz döneminde dersin orta ölçekli bir üniversitemizde 50 öğrenci ile okutulmaya baslamasının ardından, öğrencilere anket ve açık uçlu mülakatlar yoluyla edindikleri derlem bilim tecrübesini faydalı bulup bulmadıkları konusundaki düşünceleri sorulmuştur. Elde edilen veriler ışığında öğrencilerin bu dersi "pratiklik, "otantik" ve "zengin kelime içeriği sunması" açılarından faydalı buldukları tespit edilmiştir. Öğrenciler aynı zamanda yerli ve yabancı derlemler ile çalısmanın kendilerine "dilbilgisi kurallarının doğru kullanımı", "kelimeler ve kelime kombinasyonlarının doğru tespiti" ve "kelimelerin anlamsal prozodilerine karşı farkındalık gelişimi" gibi alanlarda faydalı olduğunu ifade etmişlerdir. Kelime ve dilbilgisi konularına karşı farkındalıklarının artmasi ile birlikte öğrenciler kendi İngilizceleri ile ana dil İngilizce yazarların dil kullanımları arasındaki farklılıkları bir miktar giderme fırsatını bulmuşlardır

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to measure the effect of implementing a new course into the curriculum of English majors in an English Department in Turkey. The name of the course is “Introduction to Corpus Linguistics”. Following the implementation of this selective course into the curriculum, there emerged an urgent need to investigate the possible effects of this integration on the students. This study is both qualitative and quantitative in nature and aims to explore tertiary level EFL students’ perceptions of corpus linguistics as an undergraduate course. Following the implementation of the course for a term with 50 students in an English Department of a middle size university in Turkey, the students (n:50) who selected this course were asked to exchange their opinions on the corpus experience through a questionnaire and an open-ended interview designed to measure their perceptions towards the new course.The preliminary findings suggested that tertiary level EFL students favoured selecting this course for several reasons such as practicality, authenticity and inclusion of rich lexical content. They also claimed that working with the native and non-native corpora and corpus concordances provided them with several skills such as making appropriate decisions in the use of grammar rules, words and lexical combinations as well as developing their awareness towards the semantic prosodic differences between the lexical items. Raising their awareness towards the lexical and grammar issues, the students also seized the opportunity to fill the gap between idealized native English standards and the EFL English The use of corpora has become very popular in many areas and it is largely used by linguists, translators, foreign and second language teachers and learners all over the globe for similar purposes. The growing popularity of corpus and corpus tools are due to several reasons such as providing authentic, objective, verifiable data for linguistics investigations. The authenticity of corpora allows the users to reach original texts written or spoken by the natives of the target language. Therefore, they are also called as reference corpora that provide the data of standard norms of language. According to Sinclair (1991, p 24) “although the term authenticity is a controversial concept in linguistics in the context of corpus linguistics authentic texts are defined as those that are used for a genuine communicative purpose rather than written especially for teaching purposes”. These texts are originated by naturally occurring language and this naturally occurring language data has an objective structure that does not contain any limitation or specific utterance on purpose unlike dictionaries, course books or grammar books which limit the learners with their unreal language. When Williams (1988) analysed the texts, which are taught in business English classrooms, he found many sentences that are actually never used in real business life. Instead of the business discourse, he found complete fabricated sentences. Barnbrook (1996, p 140) also describes corpora as “the tireless native-speaker informant, with rather greater potential knowledge of the language than the average native speaker”. Purpose of the Study The popularity of corpora is largely due to the fact that it is used by linguists, translators, foreign and second language teachers and learners all over the globe for a wide-ranging of purposes as a tool which provides authentic, objective, verifiable data for further investigation. Referring to the authenticity, Sinclair (1991, p 24) argued that despite being a controversial concept in linguistics, authenticity and authentic texts which are originated from naturally occurring language are used for a genuine communicative purpose. Barnbrook (1996, p 140) also describes corpora as “the tireless native-speaker informant, with rather greater potential knowledge of the language than the average native speaker”. The online availability of corpora makes it an ideal tool for language students who feel free to make self-discoveries related to the nature of English language thanks to the corpus concordances. This self-discovery process may help EFL students increase motivation and confidence as well as control their learning process and foster self-development. According to Leech (1997, p. 3) “a corpus is a rich resource of authentic data containing structures, patterns and predictable features waiting to be unlocked by the human intelligence”. This also proves that students as the researchers of corpus are able to make discoveries on topics of their interest and which may have never noticed by others; thereby, it, in a parallel fashion, enhances their motivations for language and linguistic studies. Finally, the unlimited capacity of text files forces the users to access to a large amount of data at one time and this may be difficult to grasp for some. Method The study is quantitative and qualitative in nature. Questionnaire and open-ended interviews were used in the study. The study was carried out with 50 third-year students in a middle size university in Turkey in the academic year 2016/2017. 37 participants were female and 13 were male students (37 F, 13 M) The participants were all tertiary level Turkish EFL learners who all majored in English and who enrolled in the elective “ELL3036:Introduction to Corpus Linguistics” course for a semester. This was a new elective course for the students and their perceptions of this course at the end of the term (12 weeks) were measured through questionnaires and open-ended interviews. Each of the experimental classes made use of sets of printed concordances from a native speaker corpus (the British National Corpus – the BNC, Davies 2004) and the other instrument employed in the study includes one academic written native reference corpus; KTUCALE (Karadeniz Technical University Corpus of Academic Learner English) the learner corpus created by the author. Two