Psychology in Language Education (PILE)
This research cluster aims to bring together those interested in the psychological underpinnings of language learning, teaching, and teacher education by bringing into focus the nature, dynamics, experiences, and interplay of constructs such as motivation, emotions, wellbeing, engagement, identity, resilience, care, hope, and agency within these processes at both individual and collective levels. Relatedly, the cluster seeks to examine the lives, experiences, and practices of language learners, teachers, and teacher educators through a psychological lens drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives.
Lead researcher: Assist. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Sak
Members: TBA
Language Processing and Learning (LPL)
The Language Processing and Learning (LPL) Research Cluster investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension, learning, and adaptation. Our research focuses particularly on how first, second, and heritage language speakers process and anticipate linguistic information in real time, and how they adjust their processing in response to linguistic experience. Drawing on experimental psycholinguistics and second language acquisition research, we examine the interplay between linguistic knowledge, prior experience, and the mechanisms that support the moment-to-moment processing and learning of grammatical structures. More broadly, the cluster aims to advance our understanding of the dynamic relationship between language processing and learning across diverse linguistic backgrounds and multilingual contexts.
Lead researcher: Assist. Prof. Dr. Duygu F. Şafak
Members: TBA
Conversation Analysis in Language Education (CALE)
CALE research cluster aims to conduct research on naturally occurring social interaction in diverse pedagogical settings including EFL classrooms, teacher education environments, virtual exchanges, video-mediated meetings, and robot-mediated instructions among many other contexts. CALE cluster approaches video-recorded data as the main domain of inquiry to document language learning, teaching, teacher education and use and describe the recurrent and changing interactional behaviors as it unfolds real time and becomes manifest in and through participants’ verbal and multimodal conduct. Treating talk-in-interaction as the primordial site of human sociality, CALE team aims to expand understandings of sense and meaning making mechanisms involved in language education processes with an exclusively socially-oriented and micro-analytic lens.
Lead researcher: Prof. Dr. Ufuk Balaman
Members: TBA