Views of Students and Teachers About Use of Technological Authentic Environment in Turkish Language Course

The purpose of this study was to determine the views of students and teachers about the use of technological authentic environment designed for the development of language skills in Turkish Language Course. In the study, which was carried out with the qualitative research method, the criterion sampling method, one of purposeful sampling methods, was used. A total of 20 elementary school 4th grade students in the city of Eskişehir in Turkey participated in the study in the Fall Term of the academic year of 2014-2015. In line with the research purposes, a technological authentic environment (blog) was prepared for the development of language skills in the course of Turkish Language. The blog was used in Turkish Language lessons for 10 weeks. Following this, the views of the students and teachers about this technological authentic environment were determined with the forms prepared. For the analysis of the research data, descriptive analysis technique was applied. The results revealed that the elementary school students enjoyed carrying out activities via a blog which combined the lessons and the Internet and that they were happy to know everybody could see these activities. The elementary school students also reported that they did not like the long reading texts found in the blog; that they were expected to deal with difficult texts; that they sometimes did not have the chance to access the Internet; and that the Internet was slow. In addition, what they found was boring was reading long texts, writing too much and being constantly connected to the Internet. Moreover, the students stated that thanks to the blog, they began to read faster, developed their reading comprehension skills and started to enjoy reading and that they were more attentive and eager in writing. In relation to listening, the students said they became more careful and enthusiastic listeners and started to understand what they listened to. As for speaking, it was seen that there were students who did not hesitate to speak in class. Lastly, the students put forward such suggestions as adding different categories and the chat option into the blog, playing games via the blog and making the blog accessible to a lot more people.