IMPORTANCE OF ENGLİSH:

In today’s global world, the importance of English can not be denied and ignored since English is the most common language spoken everwhere. With the help of developing technology, English has been playing a major role in many sectors including medicine, engineering, and education, which, in my opinion, is the most important arena where English is needed. Particularly, as a developing country, Turkey needs to make use of this world-wide spoken language in order to prove its international power. This can merely be based on the efficiency of tertiary education. Consequently, English should be the medium of instruction at universities in Turkey for the following three reasons: finding a high-quality job, communicating with the international world, and accessing scientific sources in the student’s major field.

The first reason for why English should be the medium of instruction at universities in Turkey is that it helps students find a high quality jobs for students to find. In business life, the most important common language is obviously English. In addition to this, especially, high-quality jobs need good understanding ability and speaking in English. Therefore, companies can easily open out to other countries, and these companies generally employ graduates whose English is fluent and orderly. For example, the student who is graduated from a university which takes English as a major language will find a better or high-quality job than other students who don’t know English adequately. In other words, the student who knows English is able to be more efficient in his job because he can use the information from foreign sources and web sites. He can prepare his assigments and tasks with the help of these information. Therefore, undoubtedly, his managers would like his effort or prepared projects. In addition, many high-quality jobs are related with international communication and world-wide data sharing. University graduates who are in a international company and business are needed to communicate with foreign workers. For instance, if their managers want them to share the company’s data, they are expected to know English. Moreover, they will even have to go business trip for their company. Absolutely, all of these depend on speaking English;as a result, new graduates have to know English in order to get a high-quality job, and the others, who don’t know English, may have lack of communication and be paid less money.

The second and the most important reason, for English to be the medium of instruction in the Turkish higher education system is that it enables students to communicate with the international world. In these days, in my opinion, the most important thing for both university students and graduates is to follow the development in tecnology. For this reason, they have to learn common language. Certainly, they should not lose their interest on communicating with the world. However, some of the university students can’t obtain English education in their university. Unfortunately, these people may lose their communication with worldwide subjects and topics. In short, they will not communicate foreign people. To prevent these people from lacking of speaking English, universities’ administration will provide English education to them. In addition, university students can use some specific hardware and software of computers with their English to communicate others. For example, the Internet, which, in my opinion, is the largest source in the world, based on English knowledge and information. Also, most of the softwares such as “Windows”, “Microsoft Office”, “Internet Explorer” are firstly written in English, and these programs are the basic vital things for communication over computer. That is to say, even in a little resarch about something, they need these programs and the Internet to find necessary sources and information.

The last reason for favouring English as the medium of instruction of Turkish universities is that it faclitates accessing information. All of the students have to do some projects or homeworks which are related with their field during the university education. In these projects or homeworks, they have to find some information which is connected with their subject. They find sources from English web sites and books, but they have to replace these data to their projects. During these process, if they know English, they will not come across with any difficulty, but if they don’t know, even they may not use these data. As a result, the student who knows English will be more successful at his/her project. For this reason, to obstruct possible inequity between students, management of universities should accept English as a second language in order to provide accessing information to the students. In short, university students need to know English to access information.

All in all, the education in universities should be done with English for three reasons. First, students who know English are able to find their favourite job related with their field. Second, they can communicate with others internationally. Third, as a major language in universities, English makes accessing information easy for students. In my opinion, internationally, people need one common language. For many years, English has been the common wold-wide language, and it will be in the future. For this reason, if you want to follow trends, new gadgets and technology, modernization of the developing world, you have to know English whatever age you are in.

Melih Sözdinler