Volume 9 (2013): Issue 2 (December 2013)

Surveys represent popular, traditional tools for collecting data from users. They have been especially popular with the growth of convenient electronic delivery methods, through email, electronic forms and especially because of the ability to distribute them quickly through social networks. In the past years, South East European University has been relying a lot on surveys for the purpose of evaluating the quality of service offered by the university to its students. Through these surveys, the university has obtained a large amount of data which is used as an invaluable feedback tool from students and contributes to the improvement of the quality of service of the university. This paper aims to investigate the possibility of applying advanced statistical methods against these datasets with the purpose of uncovering hidden information and providing the office of Quality Assurance with a variety of methods that will aid the process of evaluating staff members.

In the field of language education there are 4 basic skills that are essential in the process of teaching and learning: reading, writing, listening and speaking. In many teaching methodology publications, all these skills are integrated in one particular learning context. However, in the cultural context of Macedonia, although the reality is multicultural there is an element that shadows almost every learning/teaching material and that is the cultural aspect. It is important to be aware that treating culture as a fifth skill widens the horizon of teaching foreign languages which might be interesting and thorny at the same time in the SEEU context. In the last part of the paper, besides the data interpretation and the conclusion, a list of some well known teaching techniques and practices in foreign language methodology is provided.

The aim of the paper was to investigate teachers’ attitudes and understanding of Task-based language teaching (TBLT) at the Faculty of Languages, Cultues and Communications. In addition to this, the study aimed to identify positive effects that TBLT have in the classroom and also the reasons why teachers decide to implement this approach in their instruction. As a subcategory of communicative language teaching TBLT became a very important are of research since the last decade, 20th century and it is used in all levels of education. Neverthless, the reasearch in Macedonia in this field is very poor due to previous education where teachers used old teaching methodologies.

In this paper we attempt to identify some main issues related to teachers’ attitudes and understading of TBLT and also the implementation of some principles of TBLT. The study participants are twenty teachers who teach languages at SEEU and have different teaching experiences. The main instrument used was the questionnaire which was partly adapted and modified from Nunan's (2004), a checklist for evaluating communicative tasks, and a teacher interview.

The results obtained from the study instruments showed that participants have a high level of understanding of TBLT principles and they expressed positive views towards its' implementation in the classroom. Finally, the implications of the study may affect teacher practice and also curriculum design at SEEU.

The aim of this research was to investigate how teachers at SEEU use social media tools in and out of their work. Social media as an innovative tool can be developed to enhance teaching instruction and enrich learning practice. It also can help shift to a model of connected teaching. Social media could also enrich professional practice and offer clear support in working with students. It is clear from the results that teachers are actively and purposefully using social media to support their professional activities. The results showed that teachers and students are well-informed, self-taught, and sophisticated users of social media and consider Facebook, blogs, YouTube and others to be valuable tools in their work and personal contexts.

Successful implementation of teaching and learning in the classrooms (lecture halls) with large numbers of students has always been and remains one of the constant concerns of teachers. Recently, this has become more challenging because it is generally required that teaching should be developed according to new methodologies. The main hypothesis of this research paper is to give a modest contribution to researching and defining the possibilities for increasing the efficiency of teaching and learning in the realization of lectures in classrooms with large numbers of students. The objectives of this research paper will be focused on: more persuasive transfer of knowledge to students, motivation of students in their critical thinking, and engaging students in problem solving. One of the main objectives is to research teaching methodology through which not only will the objectives of acquisition of new scientific knowledge be reached, but also improvement in teaching and a more rational and relaxing environment.

In the education process, the student-teacher relationship has great significance, especially considering that in higher education students are enrolled from different high schools, countries, social strata and cultures. Faced with a new environment, new ways of teaching and meeting fellow students from different cultures is a difficult start for students, greater care of students by teachers would facilitate overcoming such challenges.

Respect for the student's individuality, monitoring of student progress in the educational process and recognition of student nature is the subject of study of this paper. The research was conducted at South East European University using an online questionnaire with students of different years of study, by gender, various faculties and students with different permanent residence. The online survey was also conducted with SEE University teachers to get their opinions about the topic of research. From the results obtained, we compared the views of students and teachers about teacher-student relationship from the perspective of teachers on one side and from the point of view of students from another side. From the collected data we have come to a confirmation of the hypothesis that the attitude of students towards the teacher-student relationship does not depend on the success of the student or the student's year of studies.

This paper presents the development, usage, implementation and testing of software tools in order to enhance and promote assessment and self assessment among the teaching staff in a university. We also present a new plagiarism detection tool and algorithms that will be later integrated in the University's Learning Management System, Libri, which could be optimized to detect and report plagiarism for papers written in Albanian and Macedonian languages.