English language teacher education in Turkey: Why do we fail and what policy reforms are needed?

Abstract

With the changing paradigms in mainstream educational sciences identifying teacher education as a relatively independent area, approaches and policies in second language teacher education have undergone significant reforms throughout the world in the last two decades. Turkey, as a country in the midst of both social and cultural changes due to stream of events around it, has also attempted for such reforms in its English Language Teacher Education (ELTE) policies since the foundation of Higher Education Council leading to a unified model of preservice teacher education. Teacher education, however, has always been one of the highly debated and criticized issues in the country by all the stakeholders. This paper scrutinizes the current ELTE policies in both pre-service and in-service levels in Turkey. The pre-service ELTE programs and how teachers are trained after graduation are presented focusing on the weaknesses and the drawbacks of the programs addressing to the relevant literature. Finally, the necessary policy reforms at all levels of teacher education are suggested by referring to the implementations of countries with high-quality teacher education systems.