Language Teacher Effectiveness in the Initial Years of Service: A Product Evaluation Study on the Graduates of an Undergraduate English Language Teacher Education Program

Since English has risen as the dominant world language, the demand for English language teachers has grown rapidly especially in the last four decades. Consequently, English language teacher education has also become an important concern in the Turkish national education system, which has necessitated the implementation of a series of reforms by the government. One such reform was the Foreign Language Education (FLE) curriculum designed by the Higher Education Council, forwarded to all Turkish universities to be implemented starting from the 1998-99 academic year. The Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University (METU) was one of the departments where this curriculum was followed for undergraduate English language teacher education. This book reports an evaluation study on the effectiveness of the METU FLE graduates as English language teachers. Both qualitative and quantitative data through interviews and questionnaires are analyzed in order to investigate how successful the graduates and their employers find the program and its product. The findings should be especially useful to teacher education program developers, teacher educators and trainers.