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Peer Teaching in ELT: pre-service teachers' perception
(SDU University, 2026) Rsymbet B.
This study explores pre-service English language teachers' perceptions and experiences of peer teaching within an English Language Teaching (ELT) teacher education context in Kazakhstan. The study addresses the limited empirical attention given to peer teaching in post-Soviet and Kazakhstani teacher education, where collaborative and studentcentered approaches are still developing alongside traditional instructional practices. The purpose of the research is to examine how peer teaching contributes to pre-service teachers' professional development and what challenges they encounter. The study employed a qualitative case study design supported by descriptive questionnaire analysis. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire consisting of Likert-scale items, a multiple-choice item, and open-ended questions, as well as semistructured interviews. The questionnaire involved 26 senior undergraduate pre-service English language teachers, while six participants took part in individual interviews. Quantitative data were analyzed descriptively through percentages, and qualitative data were examined through thematic analysis. The findings show that participants generally perceived peer teaching as a meaningful component of ELT teacher preparation. Peer teaching supported the development of teaching skills, classroom management awareness, instructional strategies, reflective practice, and initial classroom preparedness. However, participants also reported persistent anxiety, low peer engagement, limited teaching time, and the artificiality of simulated classroom settings, suggesting that peer teaching is beneficial but incomplete as a form of professional preparation. The study concludes that peer teaching can effectively support pre-service teachers' professional growth when carefully structured, repeatedly implemented, and supported by constructive feedback. Its effectiveness may be strengthened through longer sessions, more realistic simulations, and systematic feedback from both peers and instructors.
The Impact and Effectiveness of Open Lessons in Enhancing the Professional Competence of Physics Teachers
(SDU University, 2026) Rakhmetova N.
This thesis investigates the impact and effectiveness of Open Lessons (OLs) in enhancing the professional competence of physics teachers in Kazakhstan, using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design integrating three studies. Study 1 surveyed 566 secondary students, and factor analyses identified three attitudinal dimensions — Attitude (M = 3.57), Belief (M = 3.75), and Negative Perception (M = 2.29) — with teacher enthusiasm rated highest (M = 3.96); female, 9th–10th-grade, and high-performing students were most positive. Study 2 surveyed 218 teachers, identifying three belief dimensions (Professional Growth, Professional Collaboration, Perceived Student Benefit; 65% of variance) and three profiles (Skeptical 9.6%, Moderately Positive 38.6%, Highly Enthusiastic 51.8%), with little demographic moderation. Study 3 used reflexive thematic analysis of 86 physics teachers, yielding six themes; the most experienced teachers had dissolved the distinction between Open Lessons and regular teaching. Overall, Open Lessons show genuine developmental potential constrained by time and evaluative pressures, and the thesis recommends shifting toward professional learning, dialogic feedback, and differentiation.
Emotional Challenges for EFL Learners in Developing Speaking Skills in Secondary Schools
(SDU University, 2026) Nurmagambetova A.
Foreign language learners tend to see oral communication as one of their primary goals when learning their target language because it allows learners an avenue for expressing themselves, as well as sharing thoughts, emotions, and opinions with others during face-to-face interactions in everyday life. Unfortunately, there are a lot of secondary school students who have emotional issues that detrimentally affect their capacity to be confident when speaking in English and to engage in conversations with other students and teachers. This study investigates the emotional barriers that EFL students encounter while trying to develop their speaking skills in secondary school. The study combined qualitative and quantitative data to draw on both statistical and descriptive data. The quantitative aspect of the study was based on a set of Likert-type scales given to 57 participants in seventh grade. The qualitative portion consisted of an interview with nine individuals. Krashen's Affective Filter Theory, Foreign Language Anxiety Theory, and Willingness to Communicate concepts provided a framework for explaining how emotional factors impact participants' ability to communicate orally and participate. The research found that many students feel anxious, are afraid of making mistakes, and often feel embarrassed, hesitate, or lack the confidence to participate in speaking activities. Students experience emotional difficulties that negatively affect their fluency, vocabulary recall, confidence, and readiness to communicate in English classes. Furthermore, the research demonstrated that the creation of a supportive classroom climate, positive reinforcement from teachers, and adequate preparation help create positive experiences for students while working in pairs or groups. This work demonstrates the significant role emotions play in development EFL speaking skills within the secondary educational level across Kazakhstan and notes that creating an emotionally supportive classroom (i.e. creating a safe and secure environment) can be beneficial for learners as it allows them to communicate more freely and reduce speaking anxiety.
Investigating Knowledge Graphs for Context-Aware Search in Financial Transactional AI Agents
(SDU University, 2026) Baisenkul N.
This thesis presents an empirical evaluation of a hybrid knowledge-graph and largelanguage-model (KG–LLM) architecture for financial transactional compliance reasoning. The architecture was proposed in a companion conference paper [1] that established the design and demonstrated it on a small worked example; the contribution of this thesis is the quantitative, ablation-based, robustness-aware empirical study that completes the proposal. A deterministic synthetic dataset of 500 transactions across eight compliance-rule scenarios plus a clean negative class is generated under two complementary disciplines: a crossrule labeling pass that mirrors how real anti-money-laundering pipelines assign overall compliance, and an explicit per-channel audit of base-context fields for label-correlated content (which uncovered, and fixed, a substantial description-field scenario-leakage problem in the dataset’s earlier versions; the empirical impact of the leakage and the corrected results are reported throughout). A four-arm ablation matrix isolates the contribution of structured KG relations by varying only the grounding mode supplied to the language model. A parametric fifth arm sweeps per-transaction KG coverage from 100 % down to 0 % to characterise the architecture’s degradation under realistic incomplete-graph conditions. On the corrected, description-neutral dataset, the KG-augmented arm achieves accuracy 0.891 with perfect precision (1.000, zero wrongly-cleared violations across 1500 predictions), recall 0.691, and F1 0.817 across three independent repeats. Both no-KG baselines—a vanilla LLM and a rule-text-grounded LLM—collapse to majority-class-default behaviour at F1 of approximately 0.01, so the architecture roughly fifty-fold lifts F1 relative to the baselines while never wrongly clearing a violation. The KG-augmented arm’s accuracy advantage degrades smoothly with KG coverage and disappears at coverage below approximately 20 % (the dropout sweep crosses the no-KG baseline at p ∗ ≈ 0.81). The methodological contributions of the work include the rule-name neutrality discipline—a previously-undocumented prompt-design pitfall whereby loaded rule identifiers override structured per-rule relations in language-model reasoning, identified during the project’s first benchmark and described in detail as finding F-001 in the project record—and the description-channel audit protocol (F-007) that the thesis argues should be a default hygiene step in any synthetic-data pipeline feeding a language model.
IMPROVING HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS UNDERSTANDING OF PHYSICS CONCEPTS THROUGH FLIPPED CLASSROOM
(SDU University, 2026) Yeldos N.
This study explores the flipped classroom approach that transforms traditional teaching by teaching learning content using technology outside the classroom. The attendance time is used for interactive, student-centered activities such as discussions and problem solving. The aim of the study is to investigate the effects of a modified flipped classroom model on students' conceptual understanding and motivation. Physics is often considered a difficult subject for secondary school students and is often associated with low conceptual understanding and limited participation in traditional frontal teaching. The flipped classroom model, which holds face-to-face lessons outside the classroom and uses classroom time for active learning, has proven to be a promising alternative for overcoming these challenges. This study investigated the impact of the flipped classroom approach on the conceptual understanding of physics in eighth grade. A quasi-experimental design was used with 41 students divided into an experimental group (flipped classroom) and a control group (traditional teaching). Both groups completed tests with 30 multiplechoice questions to capture conceptual understanding before and after the flipped classroom. In addition, a questionnaire was used to measure the motivation and commitment of the students. The results showed that although both groups improved, the experimental group achieved significantly higher test results in the post-test compared to the control group. A one-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a statistically significant difference between the groups (p < 0.05). The experimental group also reported a higher level of commitment, motivation and self-confidence in learning physical concepts. These results suggest that the flipped classroom approach is an effective method for improving students' conceptual understanding and engagement in the subject of physics. By combining pre-lesson preparation with active, student-centered learning during the lesson, this model offers a viable alternative to traditional teaching methods.