Teachers' perceptions of Secondary school students' discipline problems and techniques to deal with these problems

Classroom management is the basic step of educational administration and is one of the challenging tasks. Foreign language teachers come up against different types of classroom management problems everday. The purpose of this study is to investigate the secondary school English teachers' opinions regarding the most frequently encountered discipline problems in the classrooms and the most common discipline techniques used to deal with these problems. This research was a survey study. 63 teachers of English in state and private schools from 4 different parts of Adana (Seyhan, Çukurova, Yüreğir, Sariçam) participated in this study. Both qualitative and quantitative research design were employed. The data was collected through a questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of three parts. The first part consisted of two parts of questionnaire entitled as "Student Discipline Problems in the Classroom" and "Discipline Techniques Used to Deal with Discipline Problems" was adapted from Aksoy (1999). Also, there were two open-ended questions asked to the teachers about any other discipline problems and discipline techniques that were not mentioned in questionnaires. The second part consisted of an open-ended question inquired if students' negative attitudes on learning English might cause undisciplined behaviors in the classroom and teachers' suggestions about this issue. In the third part, there were questions about demographic information. For questionnaires the data was analyzed by employing a descriptive data analysis procedures including frequencies, percentages and mean scores. For open-ended questions, the data was analyzed through the use of content analysis method. The results indicated that the most frequently encountered discipline problems to be identified were "Talking without permission", "Interrupting others while talking" and " Not doing homework assignments". The most frequently used three techniques to deal with students' problems identified were "Encouraging them to join pair/group activities", "Encouraging them to speak English", "Talking with the student after class" and "Using grading stickers or other kinds of rewards according to their behavior".