CONTEMPORARY ELT PRACTICES ACROSS EUROPE AND IN TURKEY

The European policy oriented national implementations in English language education in Turkey are basically CEFR focused, which requires three educational principles such as self-assessment, cultural diversity and learner autonomy in a lifelong learning perspective, and based on an action oriented approach. In such a system students in the classrooms are expected to be considered as independent users of the language for their personal communication needs both inside and outside of the school settings. Therefore English language is not considered as “a lesson” to study but “a language” to speak and use for communication purposes especially with the representatives of other cultures. Teachers are suggested to be the most reliable language partners of their students, course designers are suggested to consider descriptive and prescriptive implications of the CEFR, testers are suggested to remember the CEFR descriptors when developing test items, and the learner/users of languages are suggested to develop their metacognitive learning strategies through self-assessment practices (keeping an ELP model) in a self-directed learning process.