Baby Steps in a Research Community: A Case Study of Turkish Undergraduate Students' First Scholarly Research Experiences

Şakire Erbay-Çetinkaya*
Department of English Language and Literature, Karadeniz Technical University, Trabzon, Turkey.
Periodicity:April - June'2021
DOI : https://doi.org/10.26634/jelt.11.2.17366

Abstract

Research has gained a degree of recognition as a skill to develop at tertiary level, and a requirement to get a Bachelor's degree, for higher education is supposed to improve critical thinking, encourage innovation, thereby improving the quality of both teaching and research. Responding to the calls of earlier research to further explore students' attitudes towards various aspects of research, perceptions and experiences in other disciplines rather than solely arts, I captured my undergraduate English majoring students' personal research process with their attitudes, experiences and self-reported researcher identity to draw a holistic picture of the field both quantitatively and qualitatively with a case study. While the quantitative data came from a 33-item- scale to investigate attitudes towards research, the qualitative findings were reached by open-ended items. The findings show that they found research quite useful for their academic life, yet thought research could not be applied to daily life. Besides, most saw themselves as bad researchers due to lack of research experience and faced several research-related, affective, personality and health, technical, participant-related, timerelated and lecturer-related problems. Yet, they employed mostly indirect and also direct strategies in the process. The article ends with recommendations for satisfactory classroom implementations and informal classroom activities.

Keywords

Research Methods, Research Paper, Teaching-research Nexus, Attitude towards Research.

How to Cite this Article?

Cetinkaya, S. E. (2021). Baby Steps in a Research Community: A Case Study of Turkish Undergraduate Students' First Scholarly Research Experiences. i-manager's Journal on English Language Teaching, 11(2), 12-31. https://doi.org/10.26634/jelt.11.2.17366

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