Evaluation of a language course within the framework of socially responsible teaching

Abstract

This paper reports on the preliminary results of a research study which aimed to evaluate a GILE-based course (Global Issues in Language Education), as perceived by the teacher trainees in an ELT department. More specifically, it aimed to identify the ELT teacher trainees’ expectations from the GILE-based course that used environmental problems as its major theme. The course was included as an elective course in the ELT program within the framework of Socially Responsible Teaching (SRT) in order to initiate efforts to integrate global issues into language teacher education and thus to contribute to the linguistic and social development of ELT trainees. Data were collected via a questionnaire developed by the researchers through an extensive literature review. The questionnaire consisted of two parts. In the first part were open-ended questions that asked the participants to state their views about the possible benefits of a GILE-based course and to talk about their expectations from it. The second part aimed at identifying the teacher trainees’ awareness about environmental issues and expectations from the course and consisted of 22 Likert-type questions. The questionnaire was found to be highly reliable with a .81 alpha value. The research results indicated that nearly half of the trainees did not elect the course with an environmental concern and that the trainees’ expectations and the course objectives did not match in certain aspects.

Keywords

• global issues in language education, socially responsible teaching, teacher training, environmental education, foreign language development

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