The investigation of the linguistic and academic competences of the tertiary level exchange students with a special focus to the effects of their erasmus experience

Abstract

It is a fact that there is a growing interest in being an international student all around the world. In order to try the new and gain personal competences, higher education students tend towards going abroad and become involved in various internationally- recognized educational settings. In recent years, university students have chosen Erasmus Mobility Programme to actualise their European dreams. Erasmus Programme presents students to seize the opportunity to live outside Turkey, to study in a different country, to know new cultures, to travel all around the continent and to discover themselves. The focus of the present study is the investigation of the effects of the Erasmus programme, which is an international Student Exchange Mobility Programme, and the samples of the study are the Erasmus outgoing students from four different universities in Turkey. The study focused on the experiences and perspectives of Erasmus mobility students and the impacts of the programme in their developmental stages in terms of linguistic and academic aspects. The related literature was reviewed to examine the effects of Erasmus Programme on university students. A mixed-methods design was employed in the data collection and analysis process through qualitative and quantitative methods. The study collected data by applying questionnaires and semi-structured interviews from Erasmus outgoing students who joined the programme within three academic years from 2015 to 2018 from Karadeniz Technical University, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Atatürk University and Aydın Adnan Menderes University. The qualitative data were examined via encoded and content analysis and the quantitative data via SPSS software package to interpret the results of the study and to make generalizations about the effectiveness of the Erasmus Mobility programme. In addition to descriptive statistics, Exploratory Factor Analysis, T-Test and Anova tests were also utilized for the analysis of quantitative data. The items of the questionnaire were re-examined and re-grouped after receiving responses from students via Factor Analysis. With the T-test and Anova tests, it was aimed to locate the significant differences among the two or more groups in terms of several variables. By studying linguistic aspect of the Erasmus programme, it was revealed that the students developed self-confidence in using English after Erasmus experience. By studying the academic aspect of the Erasmus Programme, it was found that the students had the opportunity to compare Turkish Education System and European Education System, and they experienced adaptation problems to home institution after the programme. Also, the study aimed to observe to what extent Erasmus Programme managed to reach its goals from linguistic and academic points by relying solely on Erasmus students' remarks.