Generation Z Students’ Expectations from English Language Instruction

Bora Demir, Görsev Sönmez

Abstract


Today it is widely accepted that people perceive the world according to social, cultural, and economic conditions of the date range that they were born in. The term generation is used to define people born around the same time and have common characteristics. People who were born after 2000 are called as the generation Z and are often regarded as iGeneration or Digital Natives since they were grown up with mobile communication technologies and the internet. Hence, this generation perceives the world in a different way than the people from older generations. So, understanding how learners of generation Z learn better might be helpful for teachers, school administrators, and policy makers in designing more effective instructional settings. In this respect, this study aims at exploring the instructional expectations of this new cohort of students in the English as foreign language classrooms. Questions for semi-structured interview were developed and used to elicit the opinions of randomly selected language learners and instructors from preparation classes of two universities and the data went under content analysis. Results indicated that it is no more possible to satisfy the Gen-Z students with the application of traditional methods and strategies. Teachers and materials are expected to be technology oriented to meet Gen Zers personal and academic needs. The study concluded that while the instructors and the students share some views about language instruction in common, still a generation gap exists for some aspects of language learning regarding materials, testing and evaluation, and assignments.

Keywords


Generation-Z; language instruction; expectation

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References


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