Lifelong Learning Competencies of Prospective Elt Teachers

Abstract

The term 'lifelong learning' has become ubiquitous in educational policy documents developed over the past ten years. Lifelong learning that sets the basis of this research, is an approach that covers all the learning activities of the people that they perform throughout their lives to develop their knowledge, skills, and attitudes with a personal, social and/or employment viewpoint in order to orient themselves to changing conditions of the world. The problem of this research stems from the need to define the lifelong learning competencies of prospective English language teachers. Lifelong learning is a key concept of education and bears strong relationships with the economy of the country and it is also highly related with language development of the individuals; therefore, it is requisite for us to define the prospective language teachers' lifelong learning competencies. If we can make a clear and strong frame of the lifelong learning competencies of the teachers of the future, we can make more reliable comments on the effects of lifelong learning studies and their possible reflections for the future of our country. With this study, it is aimed to define the lifelong learning competencies of prospective English language teachers at Anadolu University in Turkey. It is also aimed to define the competencies of the participants in different categories to be able to make comments on how the participants differ among each other in terms of those categories. The research questions of the study are as follows: 1. What are the levels of lifelong learning competencies of prospective English language teachers with reference to; a- self-management competencies, b- competencies of how to learn, c- competencies of initiative and entrepreneurship, d- competencies on acquiring information, e- digital competencies, f- competencies of decision-taking. To find answers to this specific question a questionnaire adopted from Uzunboylu and Hursen (2010) will be administered to our subject group and SPSS 20.0 will be run for data analysis. At the end of the study some recommendations will be made for language educators to increase the awareness of the prospective-language teachers on this issue.