This section discusses the results of the interview studies and the questionnaire studies together as by design, the questionnaire study built on the results of the interview study. First, the results from the university context are discussed, followed by the results from the secondary school context.

 

6.2.3.1 Aspects Influencing University Tutors to Include Global Content (Studies 1 and 4) What emerged from the interview study with the five university teacher trainers was that when choosing the topics of global, local, and intercultural interest, they mostly consider the book, the relevance and topicality of the issues, the students’ interest, and the language value of the materials. Other authors have also pointed at the influence of the coursebook (Evripidou & Çavuşoglu, 2014) and students’ interests (Divéki, 2018; Macfarlane, 2015) in choosing the materials. From the interviews with secondary school teachers and the literature, other aspects influencing one’s decision to deal with global content were added to this list and based on these underlying constructs, the questionnaire was developed. As detailed in 3.4.2.3 and 4.2.2.6, unfortunately, two constructs had to be deleted from the analysis, namely the items relating to students’ interests and topicality, as they turned out to be unreliable. It would be, however, worth reconstructing the questionnaire with these constructs as well, to understand how they influence teachers’ decisions to deal with global content. Finally, the following constructs were subjected to analysis: coursebook, professional development, time, group, materials, teacher’s competence and teacher’s attitude. As reported in 4.2.2.6, university tutors rated the teacher’s attitude, teacher’s competence, and materials components the highest, thus, these aspects influence their decisions the most to deal with global content in their classes. Consequently, it seems that they mostly bring in such complex topics if they like dealing with such issues in class (teacher’s attitude), if they feel equipped to deal with potentially hot situations and they feel knowledgeable about the topic at hand (teacher’s competence) and if they think they can access materials relating to global content relatively easily (materials). Contrary to what the literature suggests (Başarir, 2017; Evripidou & Çavuşoglu, 2014; Guo, 2014; Skinner, 2012, Yoshihara, 2013), the tutors do not seem to be much influenced by the group, time, or coursebook components, which may be because tutors teaching first-year language development courses are relatively free to choose their content (some of them have to and some of them do not have to build their course on a coursebook), and that they already feel competent to deal with conflicts arising in their groups. Considering the time aspect, even if they think they need to prepare more for lessons revolving around global content, they deal with such issues regardless of time constraints and they even prioritize such issues if needed. Finally, the study shed light on the fact that tutors think their university studies contributed to their becoming global citizens, however, only some of them received training on how to incorporate global content into their lessons.

6.2.3.2 Aspects Influencing Secondary School Teachers to Include Global Content (Studies 2 and 3) The final part of the interview study with the ten secondary school teachers enquired into what aspects influence their decisions to include global content in their lessons. The most frequently mentioned themes from the interviews included time and the coursebook, similar to what was revealed by Evripidou and Çavuşoglu (2014) and Skinner (2012). Other emerging themes included teachers’ competence, including how knowledgeable they feel about the topics and their pedagogical and methodological skills to deal with them, students’ interests, the topicality of the issues, group dynamics, students’ language proficiency level, and the maintainer’s demands.