İngilizce okuma derslerinde ana fikir bulmada karşılaşılan problemlere ilişkin öğretmen ve öğrenci görüşlerinin incelenmesi

ABSTRACT AN ANALYSIS OF THE OPINIONS OF INSTRUCTORS AND STUDENTS TOWARDS THE PROBLEMS RELATED WITH THE MAIN DDEA CONSTRUCTION IN FRESHMAN CLASSES (A study Carried out at the Foreign Languages Department of Gaziantep University) by KUTLAR, Emine Lale M.A. in English Language Teaching Supervisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. Elif Leyla TOPRAK June, 2001, 141 pages Freshman students of Engineering Faculty at Gaziantep University, namely Electric-Electronics, Mechanical, Civil, Food, Physics and Textile Engineering Departments, are assigned a considerable amount of reading materials in English which are regarded as to be expository. While they are reading these passages, they sometimes fail to comprehend the text. The major reason of their miscomprehension is their inability to construct the main idea of a passage. Thus, this study aims to research the problems that freshman students at the Foreign Languages Department of Gaziantep University might come across during the process of constructing the main idea of expository texts. In this descriptive study, a questionnaire has been conducted as data collection instrument. In the questionnaire, there were 35 Likert-type items. For each.&sssss& n item of the questionnaire, frequencies, means, standard deviations and percentages were calculated. The results were calculated by using chi square test. Moreover, the questionnaire was administered to both freshman students and freshman instructors (present and ex-instructors). The inforrnants of this study were 174 freshman students and 1 1 freshman instructors. In this study, there were 3 main hypotheses related with before, during and after reading stages. Moreover, there were 35 sub-hypotheses related with the main idea construction activities which were used through before, during and after reading stages. Only 3 hypotheses were rejected at the end of the statistical analysis. Some of the general conclusions derived from the results of the statistical analysis are as follows: 1) Freshman students are generally given the chance of discussing what the passage is about by paying attention to the title or subtitle of the text. 2) 125 of 174 students and 8 of 1 1 instructors point out that before reading, a picture related with the passage to find the main idea is never or rarely used in freshman classes. 3) 7 of 11 instructors mention that the technique of finding the supporting sentences together with the main idea is never or rarely used in freshman classes. 4) Freshman students of Engineering Faculty are given little chance to make a list which consists each paragraph's main idea of a passage in English classes.Di 5) 108 of 174 students point out that they never or rarely state the main idea by summarizing the passage following the reading. Science Code: ELT 599