University preparatory students' perceptions towards native and non-native English speaking teachers

The aim of this study is to find out the thoughts and perceptions of university preparation class students who study at the Departments of English Language and Literature, English Language Teaching, Nanotechnology Engineering and the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences towards NESTs and NNESTs. This study also tries to reveal how much students benefit from NESTs and NNESTs in terms of motivation, communication and teaching/learning. The population of this study contains 186 preparatory class students at Sivas Cumhuriyet University School of Foreign Languages. A five point Likert-type questionnaire with 34 items was employed as data collection instrument. Frequency, percentage, mean and standard variation was executed for the descriptive statistics, and independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA were applied for the inferential statistics. According to the results, students benefit from NESTs and NNESTs from different aspects. They think NESTs are better at teaching speaking, listening and pronunciation while NNESTs are superior to their NEST counterparts in terms of teaching grammar and writing. One of the most outstanding results of this study is that students believe the collaboration of these two groups of instructors. Besides, students' perceptions towards NESTs and NNESTs were analyzed in terms of gender, major and language proficiency levels, and it was found out that there were differences for these variables. Key Words: Preparatory Class Students, Native Speakers, Non-native Speakers, Motivation, Communication, Teaching/Learning