An investigation into the freshmen's and lecturers' views about the preparatory school english language teaching program of a state university

The aim of this study is to investigate the English Preparatory Program at Fırat University School of Foreign Languages according to the views of the freshmen graduating from the program and continuing their studies in undergraduate programs where the medium of instruction is wholly or partially English and of the lecturers teaching undergraduate courses in English in those departments, and then to cross-compare their views. 100 students enrolled in the first grade of three undergraduate programs (Mechanical Engineering, Software Engineering, and English Language and Literature) of three faculties in 2019–2020 academic year and nine lecturers teaching in the same programs were included in the study. Developed by Köse (2012), two questionnaires—one for the students and one for the lecturers—were used as data collection tools. In addition to these instruments, one-to-one semi-structured interviews and a focus group meeting were conducted with the teaching staff and undergraduates, respectively. For this purpose, two different sets of open-ended questions had been prepared by the researcher so that the freshmen and lecturers could express their opinions in written form and verbally, respectively. In the light of the data analyzed by quantitative and qualitative methods, the strengths and weaknesses of the program were tried to be investigated and the realization level of its objectives to be determined. At the end of the study, the results revealed that there are some drawbacks of the program, and hence some revisions and improvements are needed in the program to meet students' language needs and lecturers' expectations. Keywords: EFL, English Preparatory Program, program evaluation