Teachers’ and Students’ Opinions about the Interactive Instructional Environment Designed for Bilingual Turkish Primary School Students in Norway

Within the context of multicultural education process, bilingual students face the risk of failure due to the problems they experience while using their mother language. One of the groups that have similar problems is Turkish students in Norway; these students also have many problems in learning and using their mother language, Turkish. Some of these problems can be listed as being incompetent in comprehension and self-expression, having limited vocabulary size, inadequate source for language learning and having few class hours for Turkish learning (Belet, 2009). As one of the alternative solution for all these, designing an interactive learning media can be suggested. In this context, the present study contains two phases as designing process of interactive media for the bilingual students’ use of mother language and then revealing teachers and students’ opinions about the design process and designed interactive media. Before the design process of interactive learning media, a need assessment study on the basis of the teachers’ opinions about the problems that the students experience in Turkish learning, their expectations and characteristics was conducted. The data of the research, which was projected, based on the qualitative research method, were collected in the form of survey with open ended questions on need assessment study and design evaluation process, the findings obtained were analyzed and interpreted based on the descriptive analyses method. The results of need assessment indicated that Turkish primary education students in Norway were active in technology use but incompetent in comprehension and self-expression in Turkish, besides they did not have enough vocabulary knowledge. Furthermore, it was obtained that they did not have enough sources for language learning and use, thus they expected to use various learning CDs as alternative solution for these problems. According to the results of needs assessment study, some criteria for the design process were determined and then the interactive Turkish learning media was designed. At the second phase of the study, the teachers and students’ opinions about the deigned interactive media were examined. Consequently, it was observed that both the teachers and students generally had positive opinions about interactive learning environment.