Developing Communication Skills of EFL Teacher Trainees

Higher Education Council of Turkey has added a one term course named as “Effective Communication Skills” to the curriculum since 2006 in Foreign Language Education Departments because of the crucial importance of communication in the information society. In order to test the effectiveness of this course, a research project was developed by looking at the pre-and post course interviews conducted with first year teacher trainees about communication skills compared with the fourth year students’ ideas who did not take the course. This paper describes both the significance of effective communication skills and the benefits of the course for developing teacher trainees’ effective communication skills. The implementations and suggestions for teacher education has also been discussed.