ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING PROFESSIONALS’ UNDERSTANDING OF CONTEXT

Abstract

Having an interdisciplinary nature, context is viewed differently in the relevant literature, calling for more clarification of the notion of context. How English Language Teaching (ELT) professionals understand the notion of context is crucial for effective teaching of English as a foreign language. To investigate how ELT professionals in Turkey understand context and reflect their conceptualization of context, two questionnaires and a task were used.  The results of the descriptive study reveal that ELT professionals generally agree to the propositions made in the context-theoretic literature even though they have diverse opinions about the transparency of context and about the feasibility to re-create English oral communication contexts in ELT settings. It is also observed in the results that the amount of ELT professionals’ thinking about what context is does not always increase as the academic degree levels go up. It is recommended that the pre-service syllabi of the courses of linguistics should be enriched in terms of the literature relevant to context.