Abstract

This study aims at determining the difficulties experienced by bilingual teacher candidates in education. The study has a qualitative design, semi-structured interview is used and data are obtained with content analysis method. The study group of the research includes 117 students studying at different classes in Agri Ibrahim Cecen University, Faculty of Education, and Department of Social Sciences Teaching in 2013-2014 academic year, fall semester. A tool developed by researchers, made of 13 open ended questions in order to determine the personal features and views of teacher candidates, is used as the data collection tool. Frequency, percentage and content analysis is used to analyze the obtained data. SPSS-18 package program is used to prepare the tables and in statistical analysis. This study showed that; bilingual Social Sciences teacher candidates experienced important problems especially in the first few years in their school life; they could not express themselves well in course subjects and this caused some personality problems; they could not learn Turkish efficiently which was necessary for them in education life; they wanted to have education in Turkish even though they had received education in native language; they could not properly communicate with friends who were from different regions and had the same native language; they had difficulty in communicating with both languages; they believed that they could have more a successful education life if their native language had been Turkish… etc.

Key words: Native language, bilingualism, social sciences teacher candidates, education.