Teaching English in Turkey: Dialogues with teachers about the challenges in public primary schools

Abstract

Teaching English in Turkey has its own potential problems due to the lack of authentic language input. Turkey is a foreign language context. This hinders learners in their mastering English in a short time. Moreover, other problems caused by poor instructional planning contribute to this process negatively. With these potential hindrances, the present study aims to seek what other challenges incapacitate primary schools for teaching/learning of English. Conducted with 20 primary school teachers working at public schools in Turkey, data were collected using a semi-structured interview. Results show that poor institutional planning is the main cause of challenges experienced by English language teachers. Besides this, instructional and socio-cultural/economic problems are the other challenges for teaching English.

Keywords

• Teaching English
• Turkey
• public primary schools
• challenges