The Future of Education

This study was carried out as a survey research to examine dialogic behavior of students in distance English Education Class. English class was offered through 2013-2014 Fall semester in a higher education institution in the Aegean Region, Turkey. For the current study, the theory of instructional dialog  (TID) offered by Gorsky and Caspi was used as a theoretical framework to evaluate interactions among various actors and components in a distance learning system. The TID is assumed that learning is mediated by intrapersonal dialogue and facilitated by interpersonal dialogue. Additionally, every resource in a distance instructional system (eg, instructor availability, face to face meetings, synchronous and asynchronous communication systems, self-instruction materials, etc.) can be analyzed in terms of the dialogue it supports.  

The data was collected through the Turkish version of "Tactical Approaches for Learning Questionnaire" developed by Gorsky and Caspi in 2005.  The questionnaire was administered to all 1,912 students who registered for the class and 171 students returned. The responses were subjected to descriptive statistics and the results were tabulated in tables and figures. The findings allows us not only to understand dialogical behaviors students face with conceptual difficulties during the process of English learning but also interaction types and preferences in such a learning system.