An understanding of personality type can help teachers explain why students approach tasks differently: Some are successful, while some fail to participate in class activities (Oxford & Ehrman, 1990); Wilz, 2000, (as cited in Marefat, 2006, p.116). Many research studies, accordingly, have been done so far in an attempt to measure the level of success in language learning between outgoing students and their reserved counterparts. The results of these studies often turned out to be inconsistent, some showing a clear correlation between extroversion and success in learning a language, and others failing to demonstrate that there is a positive correlation between being extrovert and foreign language proficiency. The current study aimed at discovering the relationship, if any, between learner personality types and their successes in foreign language learning. The researchers administered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as a reliable instrument to determine the personality type for each subject. Thirty-two male and sixty-eight female intermediate level prep students studying in a middle size university in the north of Turkey participated in this study with, selected on a purposive sampling methodology. The average of each learner’s scores on reading, writing, speaking and listening courses served as an index of their success in language learning. The participants were also asked to fill out the MBTI questionnaire with two options for each item. Individuals were classified on the basis of their self-reported preferences. Analysis of data indicated that there is not a statistically significant relationship between learner personality type and success in language learning.

English vowels cause major problems to Turkish English majors because Turkish and English vowel inventory do not match to a great extent. Turkish phonetic and phonological system has a significant impact on the perception and production of English individual vowels and vowel contrasts. In this respect, vowels, which carry the heart of syllables and words, fossilization in pronunciation and intonation get to be inescapable. The paper aims to find out the auditory difficulty of the order of the problem-causing English vowel phonemes for the Turkish-English majors and to determine to what rate can the non-native speaking participant distinguish such vowel sounds and match them with their IPA signs when heard in isolation within given oral stimuli. This research was designed to identify auditory perception rates of Turkish-English majors on English problem-causing vowel segmental phonemes by 39 heterogeneous pre-intermediate English freshmen majors whose basic background on English was different in a private university in Ankara, Turkey. A pre-test was constructed wherein English problem-causing vowel phonemes were used as auditory stimuli in isolation, and the participants were asked to match the IPA signs and phonemes articulated by the researcher. Since the participants had serious perception and phonetic coding difficulties of vowels in the pre-test, a three-hour teaching treatment was administrated to them. After waiting two weeks, the same pre-test was administrated as a post-test, the results of which were submitted to SPSS 20 to determine the difficulty rates of English problem-causing vowel phonemes for pre-intermediate Turkish-English majors. The rate of the order of difficulty signaled that the vowel phonemes of English inventory that did not exist in Turkish were problematic for Turkish English majors: [ɪ], with a perception rate of 66, 67% [ɑ]; with a perception rate of 48,72%, and [ə], with a perception rate of 48,72%. The results of the present study give supporting evidence to the SLM of Flege (1995) in relation to categorical sound perception and discrimination pattern.                                                                                                                                                                               

The purpose of this study is to investigate the competence level of tertiary level Turkish EFL students in terms of using complex prepositions in their expository argumentative essays. Yet, another aim is to find out the extent of which they are successful in using these prepositions in their argumentative essays. Local learner corpus KTUCLE (Karadeniz Technical University Corpus of Learner English) data was used in this study in order to investigate the preposition use and the findings were compared with the findings of a native corpus LOCNESS (The Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) in an attempt to contrast the usages and reveal overuse and underuse patterns in both corpora. This comparative interlanguage analysis of complex prepositions existing in the range of the corpus data mainly searched for overused and underused or misused prepositions. Prepositions in the semantic field of “reference” and “aboutness” in native English presented different colligational and collocational contexts and environments but the degree of this variety is further enhanced in learner corpora used in the study. Findings also suggested that overuse and underuse patterns of the prepositions in the scope of the study presented various levels of divergence when compared with the native corpus. Implications of this for English language teaching were also added to the end of the study. 

The history of teaching Turkish as a foreign language dates back hundreds of years. Individual studies and formal projects in the field of teaching Turkish as a foreign language have gradually increased worldwide and in Turkey especially in recent years. When it is compared to the studies on the other languages ​​widely spoken all over the world and considering the popularity of learning Turkish as a foreign language, it is estimated that the works must be replaced on a professional level.  In the process of teaching Turkish as a foreign language, there are not only the cooperation problems in institutionalization but also the problems about the lack of academicians and professionals and especially the capacities of the programs organized to compansate this deficiency of academicians and professionals on the field. In the study, the evaluations on the efforts made over the recent years in the process of teaching Turkish as a foreign language and the obtained results are presented. The experiences of the academicians who were employed in the process of teaching Turkish as a foreign language abroad and their contributions to the field were analyzed and 'narrative research' which is one of the qualitative research methods were used to obtain the data.