European University of Lefke (EUL) Dr. Fazıl Küçük Education Faculty Turkish Language Teaching Department organized a conference themed “Changing Role of Teachers and Effective Communication Skills”.

In the conference, Yıldız Technical University Faculty of Education Department of Turkish Language Education Academician Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bayram Baş gave a presentation themed “Basic Language Skills and Effective Communication” and Hacettepe University Faculty of Education Department of Turkish Language Education Academician Assoc. Prof. Dr. Özay Karadağ made a presentation about “Changing Role of Teachers and Effective Teaching”.

Baş; “There is no beginning nor ending of communication”

Describing communication as the exchange of information, emotion and ideas among individuals Baş listed the phases of communication as; sending message, receiving the message, understanding the message, influencing the receiver and ensuring feedback. Baş pointed out that communication is a circular process and added that there is no beginning nor ending of communication. Baş stated that in communication there are six questions and listed these questions as; “Are you listening?”, “Are you understanding?”, “Are you testing what you understood?”, “How is your massage alertness?”, “Are you able to make an empathic communication” and “Are you open-minded?”.

Baş said that, “Through communication; we learn to love, to learn about each other, to learn more about ourselves, to initiate and end relationships, to learn how others perceive us,”. Emphasizing the importance of perception capacity in communication Baş pointed out that everyone has a different capacity of perception and everyone can gather information in line with their perception capacity and added that everyone perceives in a different way and everyone learns in a different way.

Giving recommendations on effective communication Baş said that, “Talk less and listen more, give the right information at the right time, to the right person, make sure that the messages are clear, and understandable, avoid secrets, share information, never criticize the one who is next to you in front of third parties”.

Karadağ; Teachers need to adapt to the needs of the students

Karadağ stated that the long-used teaching approaches reveal certain teacher behaviors and teacher types, and that this situation has become traditional and added that despite the changes that has been in effect since 2000, the present teacher roles are not compatible with these changes. Karadağ said that, “Traditional teacher behaviors are so powerful that even if the new generation of teachers that we have trained show traditional teacher behaviors again and shape the teaching mentality in a strong way,”.

Karadağ listed the changing roles of teachers and gave examples

Karadağ said that the needs of the students have changed and added that teachers need to adapt to the needs of the students. Karadağ listed the changing roles of teachers as; they encourage students to research, guide learners in the process of constructing knowledge, take into account the individual differences of the students, and the preliminary knowledge of the students, try to learn their beliefs and attitudes, enable students to become aware of their own considerations, enable students to communicate / interact with each other, enable students to communicate / interact with the teacher, provide students with the opportunity to discuss and assess questions by providing questions, conduct classroom discussions in a way that ensure students’ knowledge structure, give students time to think after asking a question, give the students time to establish relationships between the concepts, and support the students’ ability to produce ideas and make alternative comments.