Distance or Face-to-Face Education for Language Learning: A Case of English

Face-to-face education has a history that spans almost with the existence of humanity while the beginning of distance education goes back to the 18th century. Distance education started with basic correspondence through postal service and continued with the wide variety of tools available through the Internet. However, today, distance education is perceived as an umbrella term because it covers a wide range of concepts such as online learning, e-learning, synchronous and asynchronous learning. However, in Turkey, distance education refers to the education in which higher education institutions are planned and carried out on the basis of information and communication technologies, and the courses are given simultaneously by the instructor without having to be in the same place on the basis of the interaction between the student and the instructor and between the students. Nowadays, distance education application and research centers (DEARC) are responsible for the efficient running of distance education in Turkish Higher Education Institutions. Courses generally known as "common courses" such as Ataturk's Principles and History of Turkish Revolution, Turkish Language and Foreign Language (e.g., English) are controlled and authorized by DEARCs. Since the number of students enrolled in these courses is thousands, it highly deemed to understand whether distance education differs from face-to-face education in terms of learning language (i.e., English). The purpose of this study is to compare student success in the two areas: distance and face-to-face education. 4308 and 6071 students are enrolled in the English course respectively in the spring term of the academic year 2017- 2018 and fall term of the academic year 2018-2019. The number of students enrolled in English course are categorized into distance and face-to-face groups. To achieve the aim of our study, first, the grades of students in their mid-term exam, final exam and resist exam are calculated and then compared. With the support of the trial version of the IBM SPSS Statistics, descriptive and inferential statistics were computed. Independent-sample T-Test are used to compare the success of the distance group with the face-to-face one.