To the editor:
Recently, a student who was threatened with failing one of my courses came to my office to explain her situation. Once she explained, I asked her why she had not come to me before the situation became serious. She responded, much to my surprise, "I do not like to come talk to you, because my English is not very good." An informal survey of other foreign faculty reveals that they hear the same excuse from their students with some regularity.
As it happened, this conversation occurred the very day Bilaal Ahmed's letter appeared in the Bilkent News, and I was struck in particular by his comment that Bilkent students almost never speak English outside of class. I can add that they often do not even speak English in class - I am surely not the only professor who finds himself lecturing above the ceaseless buzz of students translating for each other.
Obviously, students' engagement with English is not all it could be at Bilkent, even though students have chosen to attend an English-language university -and, obviously, the burden to improve this lies chiefly with students themselves. But are students really being encouraged to take English seriously as part of their education? Yes, their classes are in English, but the Bilkent experience as a whole - from announcements of campus activities to club meetings to the very signs on the academic buildings - tends to be Turkish-only. I fear that as long as English is a classroom-only experience for students, it will never seem natural to them; and if it never seems natural, they will never benefit fully from their classroom experience.
No one expects Bilkent to operate in English. But, given its mission, it seems reasonable to ask the university to become truly bilingual. If it did, more students might take Bilkent's English-language mission seriously, and think of English-language skills as something they are expected to learn instead of something from which they must hide. Surely the campus as a whole would benefit from such a change in attitude, and students themselves would be better educated, more confident, and better prepared to be citizens of the world.

John Groch
Assistant Professor
COMD