DIGITAL LIBRARY
CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT AND EFL STUDENTS’ FEELINGS OF ALIENATION: REFLECTIONS ON BAHCESEHIR UNIVERSITY SETTING
Bahcesehir University (TURKEY)
About this paper:
Appears in: INTED2013 Proceedings
Publication year: 2013
Pages: 2435-2442
ISBN: 978-84-616-2661-8
ISSN: 2340-1079
Conference name: 7th International Technology, Education and Development Conference
Dates: 4-5 March, 2013
Location: Valencia, Spain
Abstract:
Teaching and learning languages is not innocuously simple straightforward processes, rather, there exist a plethora of psychological social and cultural parameters. The complexities and intricacies are noticed in all cognitive , affective and behavioral domains of human intellectual effort for learning and transmitting information . EFL students have shown entirely different psychological and cultural specificities reflecting their particular personality type, ethnic background, emotional status, and culture. This diversity has also been noticed in their different degree of academic success and failure, diverse emotional orientations including their motivation, anxiety, risk taking, self-image, self-confidence, etc. Students' different learning techniques, styles and strategies can lead to successful learning and felicitous discourse with the teachers, conversely, they can experience educational failure, isolation, powerlessness, anomaly, and breakage of proper communication with the teacher. One of the repercussions of the traditional learning environments is lack of the proper interaction and felicitous discourse among the teachers and the students. The students whose interest and eagerness lies in using modern technological communicative devices go through the whole gamut of negative debilitative inhibitive feelings of boredom, tedium, frustration, agony, irritation, meaninglessness, etc. These affective parameters can be the aftermath of the psychologically destructive state called '' Alienation''. In this study, an attempt was made to decipher the interplay between technology, students' gender, ethnic backgrounds, and cultural specificities and their feelings of alienation at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey.