Back To School Feelings of Teachers of English: How Are They Doing in The School?

Abstract

Like many other countries in the world, Turkey’s education system is going through closures and re-openings of schools since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. In this paper, authors attempt to identify primarily how Turkish teachers of English feel during the most recent back to school ritual during what the Turkish government calls ‘controlled normalcy’ period. The data for the study were collected through a two-part questionnaire (see Appendix I) eliciting opinions of a total of 171 English language teachers practicing at state and private-run schools across Turkey. The first part of the questionnaire included questions corresponding to teachers’ feelings about while the second part asked questions about the participants’ professional concerns with regard to resuming teaching in person during the declared controlled normalcy. Findings of the research revealed that the participating teachers do have concerns about teaching face to face. Although there is no significant difference between the professional and emotional concern levels of the participants; the results of the research designated that teachers with 15 years of teaching experience have more professional concerns than other groups.

Keywords

• The Pandemic
• Turkey
• English Language Teaching
• Teachers of English

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