Hacettepe Üniversitesi birinci sınıf öğrencilerinden İngilizce akademik okuma beklentileri

This study explored the Academic reading needs of first-year students fromthe perspective of content course teachers in English-medium departments atHacettepe University. The study was conducted with 35 content course teachers and99 first-year students in English-medium departments at Hacettepe University in thespring semester of 2005.Three sets of data were used for this study. First, a questionnaire wasdistributed to 35 first-year content course teachers and interviews completed with 18of the teachers who returned the questionnaire. In addition, samples of requiredtextbooks were collected from the same first-year content course teachers as well asreading samples from the textbook and the final exam in the Prep school. Avocabulary test was given to 99 first-year students in English-medium departments todetermine a baseline measure of their ability.The purpose of the questionnaire administered to first-year content-courseteachers was to determine teachers? academic reading expectations for first-yearstudents. The questionnaire consisted of Likert scale items. The follow-up interviewsprovided insight into teachers? perceptions, experiences and practices related to theiracademic reading expectations of first-year students. Reading samples from the first-year content courses were collected to specify the precise reading expectations of thecontent teachers. Reading samples from the final exam and the textbook of the PrepSchool were collected to determine the exit expectations from the Prep School. Thevocabulary test was done to explore the vocabulary levels of the first-year students.To analyze the data, mean scores, percentages and frequencies were used in thequestionnaire; a coding system was used in the interviews; Flesch-Kincaidreadability test and Vocabulary Profiler were used for analyzing the reading samplesand the prep exit exam. To determine the students? levels of vocabulary knowledge,Nation?s (1990) guideline was used. The interviews were conducted with 18 contentcourse teachers who completed the questionnaire. The results reveal that all contentcourse teachers agree on the necessity of being a proficient reader in order to besuccessful in content courses. Content course teachers also agree that the academicreading curriculum should be revised to include using texts which are taught incontent course departments.Based on these results, adjusting the current curriculum in accordance with theexpectations of content course teachers is recommended, particularly in the area ofmore academic vocabulary training. Another recommendation is to adopt an adjunctmodel approach to link content courses and language courses thereby providingstudents with both content and language study simultaneously.Key words: Needs Analysis, English for Academic Purposes, Discipline specificEnglish teaching, Academic Reading, Curriculum Development, Adjunct Model.