Senem Yıldız

Social Presence in the Web-Based Classroom Implications for Intercultural Communication

Journal of Studies in International Education, 2009

Social presence is a theory derived from social psychology to explain social interactions in a me... more Social presence is a theory derived from social psychology to explain social interactions in a mediated communication and is defined as the degree to which interlocutors in a communications medium perceive each other as real. This study investigates the effect of computer-mediated communication on the social presence of international students who spoke English as a foreign language in two Web-based graduate courses offered in the United States and aims to explore how linguistic and cultural differences influenced their social presence.

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Individual and Collaborative Computerized Mind Mapping as a Pre-Writing Strategy: Effects on EFL Students' Writing

Journal of Computer and Education Research, 2020

This study examined the effects of computerized mind mapping on EFL students' essays in terms of ... more This study examined the effects of computerized mind mapping on EFL students' essays in terms of content, organization, language use, vocabulary, and mechanics. The theoretical framework was based on writing-as-process approach. Explanatory sequential mixed methods design was used to collect data. Quasi-experimental research data was collected from 45 students who were assigned to two treatment groups as individual and collaborative computerized mind mapping and control group. All participants completed a survey before and after the treatment. The experimental groups were trained on the use the mapping tool. The essays were scored according to Jacobs et al.'s (1981) rubric. The quasi-experimental phase was followed by semi-structured interviews. The results suggested the individual-mapping group performed better than the control group in terms of content and organization in all essay tasks while the collaborative-mappers outperformed control group in the second task. The results of semi-structured interviews revealed that learners had positive experiences in using computerized mind mapping as a pre-writing activity in EFL context and their attitudes towards writing were quite positive.

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Individual and Collaborative Computerized Mind Mapping as a Pre-Writing Strategy: Effects on EFL Students’ Writing

Journal of Computer and Education Research, 2020

This study examined the effects of computerized mind mapping on EFL students' essays in terms of ... more This study examined the effects of computerized mind mapping on EFL students' essays in terms of content, organization, language use, vocabulary, and mechanics. The theoretical framework was based on writing-as-process approach. Explanatory sequential mixed methods design was used to collect data. Quasi-experimental research data was collected from 45 students who were assigned to two treatment groups as individual and collaborative computerized mind mapping and control group. All participants completed a survey before and after the treatment. The experimental groups were trained on the use the mapping tool. The essays were scored according to Jacobs et al.'s (1981) rubric. The quasi-experimental phase was followed by semi-structured interviews. The results suggested the individual-mapping group performed better than the control group in terms of content and organization in all essay tasks while the collaborative-mappers outperformed control group in the second task. The results of semi-structured interviews revealed that learners had positive experiences in using computerized mind mapping as a pre-writing activity in EFL context and their attitudes towards writing were quite positive.

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Developing Electronic Portfolios in a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environment

Methods for Enhanced Instruction

Can a traditional college course be enhanced with online collaborative learning, with similar att... more Can a traditional college course be enhanced with online collaborative learning, with similar attributes to knowledge work in the modern world? Can students be engaged in semester long online collaborative work culminating their efforts in electronic portfolios that cannot be completed without the collective work of the whole group? Will some those students achieve a greater conceptual understanding of the domain than others? How will students react and adapt to kind of learning that aligns itself with assessment? These were the main questions driving the research with forty seven college level senior pre-service EFL teachers enrolled in an ELT materials development course, who were engaged in collaborative learning throughout a semester and prepared electronic portfolios consisting of their selection of best student work, all performed over a networked collaborative environment. The main goal is to probe further into the alignment of learning, collaboration, and assessment in compu...

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Social Presence in the Web-Based Classroom Implications for Intercultural Communication

Journal of Studies in International Education, 2008

Social presence is a theory derived from social psychology to explain social interactions in a me... more Social presence is a theory derived from social psychology to explain social interactions in a mediated communication and is defined as the degree to which interlocutors in a communications medium perceive each other as real. This study investigates the effect of computer-mediated communication on the social presence of international students who spoke English as a foreign language in two Web-based graduate courses offered in the United States and aims to explore how linguistic and cultural differences influenced their social presence.

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Exploring electronic forum participation and interaction by efl speakers in two web-based graduate-level courses

Distance Education, 2003

... SSF was mainly used by students and instructors to post course information, assignments, and ... more

Limited Access Environments

Türkçe Konuşan Yeti̇şki̇nleri̇n Mobi̇l Ci̇haz Di̇l Öğrenme Uygulamalari Kullanimi: Anket Çalişmasi

Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, Jul 14, 2020

Foreign language education is going under constant change. Mobile technologies have gained signif... more Foreign language education is going under constant change. Mobile technologies have gained significant momentum in foreign language education in recent years with their unique features and affordances. A large number of mobile apps have been specifically designed, created, and used for teaching foreign languages. Although these apps seem to be ubiquitous, much remains unknown with regard to their actual usage as self-directed materials. This paper reports and discusses the results of a survey study that aimed to investigate adult Turkish speaking mobile device owners' experiences with and reasons for foreign language teaching app use/nonuse, perceived effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses of apps, and suggestions for improving language teaching apps. The survey included close-ended and open-ended questions and are analyzed using descriptive statistics and content analysis methods. Results showed that mobile language learning applications are perceived to have a strong potential to overcome the constraints in front of language learning such as time, space, linguistic input. Apps can personalize instruction by taking into account the needs of different students and increase the motivation of learning with features such as gamification. However, it was also observed that learners rarely used mobile technologies used to enable a more communication-based and collaborative language learning experience.

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Using Wikis to Promote Collaborative Efl Writing

This study focuses on the use of wikis in collaborative writing projects in foreign language lear... more This study focuses on the use of wikis in collaborative writing projects in foreign language learning classrooms. A total of 34 intermediate level university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were asked to accomplish three different wiki-based collaborative writing tasks, (argumentative, informative and decision-making) working in groups of four. Student wiki pages were then analyzed to investigate the role of task type in the number of self and peer-corrections as well as form-related and meaning-related changes. In addition, focus-group interviews and questionnaires were conducted to find out how students would describe their overall experience with the integration of a wiki-based collaborative writing project in their foreign language learning process. The results revealed that the argumentative task promoted more peer-corrections than the informative and decision-making tasks. In addition, the informative task yielded more self-corrections than the argumentat...

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The Use of Blog Activities to Promote Reflection in an ELT Practicum

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

Informed by the theories of critical reflection and community of practice, this study aimed to ex... more Informed by the theories of critical reflection and community of practice, this study aimed to explore the integration of blogs to promote reflection among eighteen pre-service English language teachers registered in a practicum course at a public university in Turkey. Fourteen blog activities were designed and implemented to guide the reflective process of student teachers. Data were collected through archival documents of participants' blog entries, two focus group interviews and two surveys. A total of 457 entries were analysed in terms of depth of reflection and the analysis revealed evidence of medium or high level reflection in most (61%) of the entries and highest level of reflection in 12% of the entries. The results indicated that the blog activities guided and systematically promoted reflectivity among pre-service teachers and thus have given them an opportunity to engage in deeper levels of reflection.

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Effectiveness of Corpus Consultation in Teaching Verb+Noun Collocations to Advanced ELT Students

Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics

This study examined the effectiveness of data-driven learning (DDL), explicit instruction and the... more This study examined the effectiveness of data-driven learning (DDL), explicit instruction and these two methods combined in teaching verb+noun (V+N) collocations to advanced Turkish learners of English. Recognition accuracy of V+N collocations was measured along with participants' judgment about the acceptability of these collocations. It also explored the opinions of learners about using corpus in learning V+N collocations. Quantitative data were analyzed via a one-way independent analysis of variance and descriptive statistics. Results revealed a statistically significant difference between the three groups in their recognition accuracy of V+N collocations. While the Explicit-Instruction (EI) Group and the Combined (C) Group scored significantly higher than the Data-Driven Learning (D) Group, the means of the EI-Group and C-Group did not significantly differ. With respect to the judgment about the acceptability of V+N collocations, the EI-Group significantly outperformed the D-Group; but the difference between the EI-Group and the C-Group; or between the C-Group and the D-Group was not statistically significant. The questionnaire data showed that the participants found the instruction with the use of corpus more useful and effective for learning V+N collocations than instruction without.

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Effects of Different Types of Tasks on Junior ELT Students’ Use of Communication Strategies in Computer-Mediated Communication

International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, 2013

This study describes the use of communication strategies in a synchronous computer-mediated commu... more This study describes the use of communication strategies in a synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) environment and examine whether task type has an influence on the frequency and variety of communication strategies (CS) used in this environment. To this end, use of CSs in three different communicative task types: jigsaw, decision-making and opinion-exchange were examined, based on and adapted from Dörnyei and Scott’s (1997) and Smith’s (2003) CS taxonomies. The data for this study was collected from 36 junior ELT students studying in a Turkish university. The results showed that the participants made use of a variety of CSs that were previously observed in face-to-face communication, and they used some CSs which are peculiar to CMC environment. It was also found that task type affected the frequency and type of CS used, favoring jigsaw task types in resulting more use of CSs.

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Exploring factors influencing EFL speaking international graduate students' forum participation and social presence in two web-based graduate courses in the U.S. /

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, 2003.

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