1. Language difficulties that international postgraduate students experience during their education with the medium of Turkish language

Language of instruction is a crucial aspect of teaching and learning process in every educational context. Thelanguage competence in fact can affect the degree of success of the students and their academic performancethroughout their education; especially in postgraduate education level in a foreign language. In this case, it willbe very difficult for the international students to pursue their education in an entirely different context with alanguage they learn for the first time. There is a sizeable amount of existing research carried out on the languagedifficulties of the international postgraduate students with the medium of instruction (mostly in English). Thefindings show that inadequacy in language utilization puts a profound negative impact on students‟ learning andunderstanding the intended content knowledge. Thus, the current study was conducted to explore the languagedifficulties that the international postgraduate students experience during their education at Turkish universitieswith the medium of Turkish, their applied strategies, the given supports, their suggestive solutions andexpectations to reduce their current problems. The data was collected through a one-to-one semi-structuredinterview with 15 international postgraduate students from different countries pursuing their education indifferent faculties at Mersin University. The results of the study revealed that the main problem of these studentswas writing followed by speaking, listening and reading respectively. However, the problems related to thelanguage skills were linked to other underlying factors such as poor vocabulary, fast speech rate of theinstructors, structural aspects of the Turkish language and some others.

3. Examining Turkish University Students’ Sense of Achievement, Motivation, and Anxiety: A Comparison of the English- and French-Medium Education Systems

Foreign language-medium instruction at tertiary level is receiving great attention in our decade. Thus,this study examines the significance of the following psychological factors for Turkish students enrolledin tertiary education: (i) sense of achievement, (ii) motivation, and (iii) anxiety. In particular, it focuseson the perceptions of Turkish students receiving tertiary education by an English-medium instruction(EMI) or a French-medium instruction (FMI). The study also focuses on the impact of context onstudents’ perceptions. To collect data, students enrolled in an EMI (N = 144) and FMI (N = 214) wereadministered a five-point Likert scale survey. Seventeen students were also interviewed for this study,and they represented one Turkish public university and two private universities. The study revealed thatthe students in both contexts had a higher sense of achievement, motivation, and low level of anxietywhilst receiving foreign language as the medium of instruction. Regarding the contextual difference,however, although the EMI and FMI students both perceived themselves successful, the former wasfound to be more motivated, whereas the latter was found to be more anxious. This paper discusses theimplications of these findings as well as giving suggestions for further research.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).