A descriptive study on in-service English language teachers’ perceptions of the European portfolio for student teachers of languages (EPOSTL) in Turkish setting
Abstract
This article aims to arrive at an understanding of in-service language teachers’ perceptions of the EPOSTL self-assessment descriptors in relation to Turkish Foreign Language Education context. More specifically, the researcher aims to reveal the categories of the EPOSTL self-assessment descriptors that have been regarded more important by in-service English language teachers who work for primary, secondary and tertiary level institutions as well as reviewing the suitability and applicability of the EPOSTL self-assessment descriptors for the Turkish context. Adopting a quantitative and quasi-qualitative research design, this study utilized the 195 self-assessment descriptors of the EPOSTL as the items of the questionnaire in the form of a ‘5 point Likert-type scale’ and an open-ended question has been added as the 196th item to collect qualitative data. The means of the in-service English language teachers’ answers have been computed for the whole document and for the categories of the self-assessment descriptors via descriptive statistics involving mean and frequency analyses. As a second step, the distribution of the data has been analyzed via ‘Kolmogorov-Smirnov Goodness-of-Fit Test’. As the distribution of the data is not normal, a non-parametric test, rather than a parametric test, has been employed in order to find out the level of differences between and among the groups of in-service English language teachers. Additionally, ‘Kruskal-Wallis H Test’ has been conducted and ‘pairwise comparisons’ have been performed as a last step in order to reveal the self-assessment descriptors of the EPOSTL that have been attached meaningfully different importance by in-service English language teachers working for different levels of institutions. The findings of this study indicate that the self-assessment descriptors of the EPOSTL have largely been welcomed by in-service language teachers in Turkish context.
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