USING THE INTERNET AS A TOOL TO LEARN ENGLISH: TURKISH EFL LEARNERS’ PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

In recent years, traditional teaching methods in ELT classes have been integrated with internet-assisted teaching. The role of the Internet as a language learning tool has been recognized in many educational environments. This study wanted to explore Turkish EFL learners‟ habits of using the internet to learn and practice English along with their perspectives on internet-assisted language learning. The data were collected from 109 Turkish EFL learners from Private Üsküdar Bağlarbaşı Secondary School, BA, MA, and Ph.D. students from the universities in Istanbul as 66 females and 43 males, who were provided with a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire which consisted of 30 statements regarding the internet in two separate sections. Participants showed their level of agreement with these statements. The findings demonstrate that the perceptions of the participants towards the use of the Internet for language learning purposes were mostly positive. The outcome of the research reveals that Turkish EFL learners tend to practice language systems, and receptive-productive language skills through the Internet to different extents. The results appear to have contributed to current research on the use of the Internet as an educational language learning tool while more in-depth exploration is still needed.