DEVELOPING A SCALE TO EVALUATE TURKISH PRIMARY SCHOOL SECOND GRADE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING PROGRAM

In Turkey, three major English Language Teaching Program (ELTP) changes have taken place since the first ELTP introduced in 1997. Following the 2006 ELTP, a new program was launched in 2013 with the common name known as 4+4+4 education system with whichEnglish Language Teaching Program was started from the 2ndgrades in primary schools. Due to lack of a valid and reliable evaluation tool in literature, this study aims to develop and validate a scale to evaluate the 2ndgrade ELTP that is currently in use in the Turkish education system. The scale development steps of DeVellis (2003) were followed and 84 items were pooled via conducting a literature review and document analysis, surveying the opinions of 15 primary school language teachers and utilizing interviews with 5 teachers. With the participation of 118 teachers, the first version of the scale was submitted to exploratory factor analysis, which yielded a five-factor solution with 34 items. This revised version was then administered to 85 teachers to conduct confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis. In its final form, the scale consisted of 28 items with 5 factors, the Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients of which ranging from .86 to .93. The results indicate that the scale can be used toevaluate the 2ndgrade ELTP.