Teaching gifted students through authentic instruction: Reflections from the EFL teachers
Keywords:
Gifted education, gifted students, authentic instruction, teaching English as a foreign language, gifted language learners.Abstract
The review of literature highlighted that gifted students may gain a lot from authentic instruction in that this methodology may serve well to their needs for inquiry, meaning-making and higher level thinking. Therefore, this qualitative study realized in a phenomenological design aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the EFL teachers’ ways of integrating authentic pedagogy into their teaching situations with gifted students. Thus, part of the aim of this study is to investigate how foreign language teaching and gifted education could be linked to one another and in this way it also aims to propose an interdisciplinary focus of research. The participants were six EFL teachers that were sampled from those teaching gifted language learners at Science and Arts Centers (BILSEMs) in one geographical region of Turkey and asked to share their experiences about the implementation of authentic instruction in their gifted classrooms. The results showed that the EFL teachers mostly followed the firmly established standards of the authentic instruction in the literature and they believed that authentic instructional practices enhance gifted learners’ learning and intellectual capacities. However, there were some problems or barriers such as class size and time constraints against the better implementation of authentic instruction in their gifted EFL classrooms as reported by these teachers.
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