English Teaching Policies in Turkey: An Evaluation from a Native English Teacher

Teaching foreign language has been an important issue in the agenda of Turkish education system for lots of reasons. Globalization is one of these reasons which brought about an unprecedented spread of English in Turkey as in many other non-English–speaking countries. English, currently, is the only foreign language that has become a compulsory subject at all levels of Turkish education, but the spread of English has created serious challenges to Turkey’s language policy (Kırkgöz, 2009). One the considerable negative effects of spread of English is on the stability of Turkish language teaching policy. Lots of changes might easily be seen in time. For instance, once foreign language courses were made elective courses; then these courses were decided to be compulsory after a while; in the past foreign language courses were started from the 6th grade now it is thought from the 4th grade of primary schools; total weekly hours of the courses have been changed and so forth. Due to the differing policies; course curriculum, course books sometimes teaching methods have been changed in time. Despite the efforts, it could be realized that the students taking English courses from primary school to higher education are commonly unable to reach the desired level and low foreign language proficiency level has remained a serious problem (Çelebi, 2006; Işık 2008). In this study, language teaching policies (mainly English Teaching policies) are mentioned, an evaluation of these policies are made in the first part of the study; and in the remaining part strong and weak points of English teaching based on the experiences of a native English teacher together with the solutions to overcome the problems related with the issue