Journal of Educational Sciences

18-32

Authors: Pınar Tural, Feryal Cubukcu

Teaching culture is an indispensable part of language teaching as language and culture are intertwined. Awareness of one’s own culture and the target culture is necessary to be able to communicate efficiently. To raise intercultural awareness among EFL learners, literary sources can be a great source as they are authentic and reflect cultural elements. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of short stories on intercultural awareness. In this quasi-experimental study, an experimental and a control group were chosen among B1 level of EFL students. The research was carried out in the School of Foreign Languages at a university in the Western part of Turkey. In a six-week implementation period, the experimental group (18 students) read short stories with cultural themes from different cultures. On the other hand, the control group (19 students) read nonliterary texts again with cultural themes in them. In the study, quantitative data was collected through the Intercultural Awareness Questionnaire prepared by Zorba (2019), and the questionnaire was implemented as a pretest and posttest to gather data. The findings of the study showed that there was no meaningful change in the intercultural awareness of the study group before and after the implementation in terms of intercultural awareness. Furthermore, no significant difference was observed between the experimental and control groups. In the study, it was also concluded that gender and international experience did not lead to a difference in terms of intercultural awareness of participants. The overall conclusion that can be made from this study is that intercultural awareness focus in language teaching may ameliorate the language competence of learners, but it might take time to increase awareness among learners, so institutions should prioritize increasing awareness of EFL learners with various activities.

44-62

Authors: Tina Vrabie, Carmen Mihaela Crețu

In order to provide quality instruction for students, to cultivate free and entrepreneurial spirits, the educational system needs teachers capable of acting as mentors for their students; inspiring them, teaching them about moral values and helping them develop their cognitive and career-orientation skills. Through the impact that it has on the development of students in general and on the talented students in particular, mentoring is one of the most appropriate strategies for achieving this goal. This article is a narrative review of the studies identified in the literature that describe a series of mentoring programs especially designed for talented students, which have contributed to their development on the psychosocial and cognitive level, as well as on career orientation. Complete research articles related to mentoring programs for talented students were gathered from online database searches and needed to meet several criteria: (1) the program evaluated needed to involve mentoring as the practice has been defined like an ”ideal type” of mentoring in the literature (Grassinger, Porath, & Ziegler, 2010); (2) the study had to examine the impact of involvement in a mentoring program on the development of talented students on several levels: psychosocial, cognitive, career support; and (3) the sample used in the evaluation of the program needed to include the talented students that are more predisposed to benefit from a mentoring program: talented primary, gymnasium and high school students and twice-exceptional students (Goff & Torrance, 1999; Subotnik, Olszewski‐Kubilius, Khalid, & Finster, 2021). The results of this review underline the impact of the talented students’ involvement in a mentoring relationship on their development and the necessity for this type of programs to be sustained in an educational context, not only at an informal level but also through formal programs specifically designed and implemented for this purpose. The paper concludes by presenting a series of recommendations on how such programs can be effectively implemented at the educational institutions level.

85-98

Authors: Irina-Cristina Pachița, Alois Gherguț

Despite the constant efforts to implement an inclusive education system at the level of educational policies and practices, there are nevertheless a number of factors influencing the effectiveness of inclusive education. Teachers, as key actors of education through the lens of their work, are a determining factor in the success of the implementation of inclusive education and the quality of education. The way they relate to students with disabilities has a significant impact on the quality of inclusive education. Beliefs about the importance of inclusion, expectations of inclusive education outcomes and inclusive classroom practices have a higher level of occurrence for teachers with fewer stereotypes. Questioning 90 teachers, it has also been shown that the level of stereotypes is lower for teachers who have experience working with children with disabilities. These results demonstrate that the efficiency and quality of an inclusive approach depend on these psychological constructs of teachers and a good inclusive education starts from the beliefs of each teacher. Also, those teachers who have experience working with students with disabilities tend to have a low level of stereotyping, compared to teachers who do not have this type of experience, so coming into contact and the experience, predominantly positive, with students with disabilities leads to knowledge of the specifics of this area, finding resources in diversity and, ultimately, lowering the level of stereotypes that can lead to exclusion and segregation.

113-115

Authors: Gina Florentina Tudorache, Mihaela Badea

Book review