Educational Technology Research Trends in Turkey: Investigating Graduate Theses in English Language Teaching

The goal of the present study is to investigate educational technology research trends across graduate thesis written in the field of English language teaching and learning between 2016 and 2020 in the context of Turkey. A total of 146 theses were examined by means of a descriptive content analysis methodology. The findings of the study demonstrated that the research focus of the theses was dominated by attitudinal studies and research exploring digital literacies and 21st century skills, while four groups of technologies were strongly prevalent across the theses, which were CALL resources in general, video-based materials, skill-based Web 2.0 tools, and learning management systems (LMS) and e-learning platforms. It was also found that the majority of researchers adopted mixed-methods approach, commonly employed survey, interview, and achievement tests as data collection tools, and frequently analyzed the data by means of quantitative analysis methods. Following the discussion of each finding within the context of both educational technology and English language teaching scholarship, the study concludes with several suggestions in the light of the results.

The goal of the present study is to investigate educational technology research trends across graduate thesis written in the field of English language teaching and learning between 2016 and 2020 in the context of Turkey. A total of 146 theses were examined by means of a descriptive content analysis methodology. The findings of the study demonstrated that the research focus of the theses was dominated by attitudinal studies and research exploring digital literacies and 21st century skills, while four groups of technologies were strongly prevalent across the theses, which were CALL resources in general, video-based materials, skill-based Web 2.0 tools, and learning management systems (LMS) and e-learning platforms. It was also found that the majority of researchers adopted mixed-methods approach, commonly employed survey, interview, and achievement tests as data collection tools, and frequently analyzed the data by means of quantitative analysis methods. Following the discussion of each finding within the context of both educational technology and English language teaching scholarship, the study concludes with several suggestions in the light of the results.