process tracing

Having witnessed the unprecedented prevalence of online education during the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, the present research was motivated to explore the challenges facing an EFL teacher throughout an online English course of intermediate level. To this aim, a process-tracing approach (Checkel, 2006) was employed to unravel the causal mechanisms involved in the beginning, middle, and end of the course. The results showed that deficient technological resources caused the greatest challenges throughout the course, especially in the initial and mid-sessions. Also, the two other causal categories, human and content resources, were at their peak at the beginning of the course and were no longer noticeable at the end of the course. The most troublesome challenges the teacher faced were platform limitations, internet connection, and human resources’ unpreparedness for online education. Furthermore, the teacher’s and most students’ technological knowledge, as well as their media literacy, increased by the end of the course, but some students’ rather slow adaptation to the sudden online environment challenged the teacher during the course. Finally, suggestions were made to prevent these challenges or handle them effectively upon occurrence, especially in developing countries, where the required infrastructure for online education is lacking, and the majority of teachers, students, and institutions might not be yet adequately prepared for the online mode of teaching and learning languages.

Just as the political structure of any country can have a positive or negative impact on the democratization process; The opposition bloc, which includes political parties and currents, civic institutions, etc., has a dual positive and negative impact on this process. In Turkey, the influence of the opposition bloc in the democratization process has been relatively positive for a century. However, in the last two decades, with the rise of the Islamist Justice and Development Party to power, the Turkish opposition bloc has adopted varying approaches to the political structure, which has had a more negative impact on democratization process. The current research has examined the performance of the Republic People's Party as the largest opposition party, focusing on three main approaches of Turkish parties towards the political structure. To this end, a historical institutionalism approach has been adopted using library and digital resources. In terms of methodology, this study has employed the process tracing method. Turkish opposition bloc, especially the political parties, though considered to be a major indicator of democracy, seems to have adopted undemocratic political procedures such as "appeasement procedure", "supportive procedure" and "deviant procedure" in the last two decades.