The attitudes and opinions of pre-service English teachers towards Kurdish-Turkish bilingual education in Turkey

This study investigated attitudes and opinions of pre-service English teachers towards Kurdish-Turkish bilingual education in Turkey. The participants of this mixed-methods study were 153 students from the Foreign Language Education Department of a high-ranked state university in the Marmara Region of Turkey. The instrument, "Bilingual Education Attitudes and Opinions Survey" included demographic information followed by 20 items for the quantitative, and 3 open-ended questions for the qualitative part of the study. The instrument was refined based on the feedback of 6 experts following the pilot study. Then it wasreshaped and reformatted before it was used in the study. The quantitative data was transferred to Statistical Program for Social Sciences (SPSS), version 20 for statistical analyses. The reliability of scores (Cronbach's α) was .84, a high level of reliability. The qualitative data was transferred to Microsoft Office Word Program, 2013 version for content analysis and thematic analysis. The statistical analyses revealed that a high percentage of the participants (44 %) had high positive attitudes towards Kurdish-Turkish bilingual education in Turkey. The regression analyses showed that men had positively higher attitudes than women whereas ethnicity was not a significant predictor of the attitudes. The content and thematic analysis indicated that some participants were of the opinion that bilingual education in Turkey could have some advantages in terms of school and academic success, human rights, psychological benefits, and cultural diversity. On the other hand, some participants were of the opinion that bilingual education in Turkey could provoke conflicts, cause separation, affect other minorities negatively and be abused by some people. Some participants also thought that some necessary steps including educating the staff and raising public awareness should be taken to initiate bilingual education, prevailing the peace within the country. Keywords: Bilingual Education, Mother Tongue, Kurdish-Turkish, Attitudes, Opinions.