Evidence, context, and pedagogy: rethinking ELT practice in Turkey through a contextual validity lens

Abstract

In English language teaching (ELT), pedagogical evidence rarely transfers intact across educational systems, a challenge particularly salient in Turkish ELT. This perspective article introduces contextual validity as an analytical and evaluative framework for judging whether a research-supported pedagogy remains educationally appropriate, institutionally feasible, sociolinguistically legitimate, and ethically defensible in a given teaching ecology. Unlike context-sensitivity, which describes variability, contextual validity issues a verdict: a practice is appropriate, appropriate with adaptation, or inappropriate for the given context. Building on postmethod critiques and extending them through ecological and complexity perspectives on teacher agency and language learning, the article specifies six analytical dimensions with measurable indicators, a provisional normative hierarchy for weighing dimensions that may conflict, and a staged workflow for professional judgement. Translanguaging pedagogy in multilingual Turkish classrooms serves as the case example, demonstrating the framework's discriminating, analytical use. The more productive question for Turkish ELT is not which method the field should adopt globally, but whether, by what evidence, and at what level of decision-making, a given pedagogy can be justified locally.