Turkish EFL lecturers' opinions on global issues in language teaching at tertiary level

Global issues are related to the daily lives of individuals and they should be emphasized by a global attention. However, education seems to play a major role in reaching future masses. For this reason, language teachers are seen among the most fortunate ones to incorporate any topic in classroom teaching. Therefore, this research has the ultimate purpose of finding out English as a foreign language (EFL) lecturers' views about integration global issues in teaching English. To achieve this aim, this study employs 414 EFL lecturers working at 12 universities located in different regions of Turkey in order to bring soundness to the Turkish context. In order to learn participants' views in a systematic way, this study adopts a sequential explanatory mixed methods research design. The sequence was accomplished by using a questionnaire, which aimed to reveal EFL lecturers' views about to what extent they opted for integrating global issues in language teaching, and a structured interview form, which dug in 29 participants' deeper insights and further comments on the questionnaire data results. The results of the study indicate that Turkish EFL lecturers mostly favour the match of global issues and language teaching regardless of any statistically significant difference observed among gender, age, overall years of teaching experience but only previous experience on using global issues as the content for language teaching. As a specific note to the classifications of global issues, they prioritized Environmental Issues more than other issues in the quantitative results and favoured such priority due to their familiarity with the topic in the qualitative results. On the other hand, the statistical analysis showed that Language Imperialism was seen the least important global issue. However, the qualitative content analysis showed that participants disfavoured the place of Language Imperialism in the statistical results by relating it to culture, lingua franca and awareness. Blending the merits of both quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study ends with several implications and suggestions for language teachers, curriculum developers and textbook authors. Keywords: Global Issues, English as a Foreign Language, Environmental Issues, Language Imperialism.