“Contemporary Issues in Focus”, the new coursebook for Freshman English 101 and 102, has just been published. The book has been compiled by the Freshman English instructors and printed by the UK branch of Pearson Education Limited.
“Contemporary Issues in Focus” consists of four chapters: “Media and Popular Culture”, “Gender”, “Race and Ethnicity” and “Innocence, Experience and Family Matters”, and contains a total of 52 texts. In each chapter, there are essays and articles by authors such as Simone de Beavoir, Naomi Wolf, Susan Bordo, Salman Rushdie, Martin Luther King Jr., Amin Maalouf, Patricia Holland and Neil Postman, and short stories by important literary figures like Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Frank O’Connor, Isabel Allende and Sevgi Soysal.
Ali Nihat Eken from the School of Languages attended the VIII Annual Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture in Rome, Italy, in the first week of December 2009. This year’s forum was based on the theme of “Crossing Borders and Building Bridges: A Global Program for the Future.” In the forum Eken presented his classroom research on studying representations of gender and sexual identity in film.
Arguing that although originally not intended for educational purposes, film can prove to be a legitimate subject matter that can be studied in its own right and a valuable teaching and learning tool in many educational settings, Eken drew upon his findings of his classroom research study he conducted in Freshman English 101 and 102, undergraduate content-based language courses in Sabanci University.
Ali Nihat Eken’s presentation aimed to answer the following questions: What does studying representations in films involve? What do representations of gender and sexual identity reveal about human relationships and belief systems? While answering such key questions in the light of relevant literature and his findings, he also discussed whether an awareness of views about gender and sexual identity would encourage learners to revisit and revise their own value systems and thus cross ideological borders, build bridges of tolerance and celebrate diversity.
IATEFL TEA SIG CONFERENCE IN CYPRUS - 23-24 October 2009, Famagusta
Meral Güçeri, School of Languages, Sabanci University
The latest IATEFL TEA SIG Conference was held at the Salamis Bay Conti Hotel, very near Famagosa, located on the seaport of the north east coast of Cyprus. The conference, which hosted about 145 participants from 16 countries, dealt with the crucial areas of assessing speaking skills with its 24 sessions, 4 plenaries and a round up discussion. Cocktails, social activities, folk dancing and a Cypriot menu accompanied by the warm sea with the sunny beach made the event an unforgettable one for all the delegates. Everyone was so inspired that no session was missed, notes were taken and hot discussions took place both in the session rooms, at coffee breaks and on the beach.
The conference has achieved its aim by looking at different contexts of teaching, assessment and speaking as well as exploring related issues.
The first day started with Zeynep Ürkün’s intriguing opening speech, which was followed by Liz- Hamp Lyons’ plenary talk entitled “Spoken English Proficiency: Bringing together teaching and assessment” describing an innovative speaking assessment that they have developed in Hong Kong, focussing on not only how the criteria for assessment have arisen, and how they have been validated and communicated to the stakeholders, but also the role of teacher as an assessor in a classroom-based assessment context.
On Friday morning my session entitled “Let’s assess life skills: Here is the criteria” aimed to discuss a seminar presentation criteria designed to assess Freshman English learners’ seminar skills. A learner’s seminar presentation video was shared and half of the participants were invited to evaluate learner performance by using the chunks of an analytical criteria while the other half used a holistic criteria. Student involvement in oral assessment was explained in detail.
In the afternoon Meltem Bizim and Devrim Demirezen Uygan had a workshop called “Optimizing Speaking in the EFL classroom”, which emphasised the recent trends in the field of teaching speaking and the crucial role of task design to optimize speaking skills in EFL classrooms . They shared the highlights of the study that they conducted at Sabancı University, the key principles for designing tasks, and sample tasks that they designed as part of their study. One section of the workshop was also allocated for providing hands on experience.
The second plenary session was by Evelina Galaczi on “Assessing Speaking: An approach grounded in theory and practice”. Galaczi stressed the fundemental role speaking skills played in language learning, teaching and assessment. She explored the close relationship between learning and assessment through a focus on specific exam features. She argued that the role of speaking tests should be to promote beneficial washback.
The Saturday morning plenary speaker was John H.A.L. de Jong whose session was on scaling speaking. Jong discussed the issues related to scaling that are either not understood or ignored, including the mathematical relation between levels and the definition of the boundaries between levels. Examples of the scaling speaking of speaking tests and the procedures underlying the levels of CEF were provided.
The final plenary talk was by Susan Davies who highlighted crucial areas of the issues in testing spoken English. Her workshop aimed to raise participant awareness on the various challenges of portfolio assessment or use of a test. She stressed that it was possible to overcome some specific issues in testing spoken proficiency and to understand the process which would enable them to take up the challenge of producing their own tests.
On Saturday afternoon Adam Simpson’s session “What constitutes effective pre-oral exam practice?” shared findings of research conducted on student perceptions of what constitutes effective pre-oral exam practice. What students consider beneficial, what they find less useful, overall feelings regarding oral assessment and the mismatch between teacher and student perspectives at the preparation stage were highlighted.
The conference ended with a round-up discussion by the plenary speakers.
Alone together…
Inspired by new and alternative ways of thinking, SL Director, Deniz Kurtoglu Eken explores personal and professional growth in her recent article in English Teaching Professional (November 2009). ‘We experience togetherness in many aspects of our lives, both at a personal and professional level, and we certainly are not alone in a lot of things we do. Yet to be what Timothy Gallwey (2002) calls ‘ourown close friends’, we need to look both inward and outward to see the beauty in being ‘alone together’.
Sonja Tack Erten’s paper on translation has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Specialised Translation. This paper “started life as a final essay for a theory of translation course for the MA in Translation Studies at University of Portsmouth, UK. The abstract is as follows:
Establishing norms for functional translations from Portuguese to English: The case of academic calls for papers
There is growing recognition that the greater the translator’s awareness of how specific genres operate at both the cultural and textual levels in particular language pairs, the more likely the resulting translation is to achieve the goal of functional equivalence. This study uses a small comparable corpus to investigate the similarities and differences in the genre conventions of academic calls for papers (CFPs) written in American English and Brazilian Portuguese. The schematic structure and textual functions of CFPs are identified, and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is used to sketch out the broad common features of this genre. Significant differences at the micro-pragmatic level of discourse are then described, and several practical translation strategies are suggested for translators working from Portuguese into English. The overall aim is to encourage translators to make a series of choices that will achieve an overall effect which is highly appropriate to the pragmatic norms of the target text.
Sponsored by OUP, SL Director Deniz Kurtoğlu Eken gave professional development seminars to English language teachers and managers at Eastern Mediterranean University’s (EMU) English Preparatory School between October 14 and 16, 2009. Her plenary entitled, Alone Together in Development and Change: Creative Processes for Personal and Professional Growth was attended by over 100 teachers. There were follow-up workshops for teachers in two separate groups, called Teachers as Learners and Researchers. Kurtoglu Eken also worked with EMU Preparatory School managers on performance management and assessment principles and processes. The three-day event was very well received by teachers and managers generating a wide range of ideas for reflection, discussion and implementation.
Media coverage of the seminars: Picture 1 / Picture 2 / Picture 3
SL in Action: Columbia University Summer Institute American Culture and EFL Teaching in Turkey
Hülya Görür Atabaş, School of Languages, Sabanci University
The 2009 Columbia University Summer Institute entitled American Culture and EFL Teaching in Turkey was held between June 15-19 at the Sabancı University Karaköy Communication Center.
The five-day institute, which was jointly sponsored by the English Language Office of the U.S. Embassy’s Office of Public Affairs, and The Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies, Teachers College, Columbia University, and hosted by Sabancı University Writing Center and the Educational Reform Initiative, aimed to bring together 50 educators from various universities in Turkey to explore areas such as technology, standardized testing, alternative assessment, as well as American culture, literature, and politics in relation to teaching English as a foreign language in Turkey.
The institute hosted participants from Faculties of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, Western Languages and Literatures, Cultural Studies, International Relations, Humanities, and School of Languages from not only metropolitan cities such as Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara but also from cities such as Adana, Çanakkale, Edirne, Eskişehir, Gaziantep, Konya, and Trabzon. I thought that this diverse background did not only cater for a better understanding of issues pertaining to the use of English at institutes for higher education in Turkey but also provided us with an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and practices on American Literature and Politics, Use of Technology, Skills Development and Integration, Testing and Assessment, and Materials Development.
The 50 participants in the institute were invited to discuss, work on, and present various issues that arose from a combination of a carefully selected digital packet of readings, the input sessions provided by the team of professors from Columbia University Teachers College, and workshops led by colleagues from the Writing Center.
Among the various strands in the institute were:
Focusing on how different languages and literacies can be used as resources to advance human development, education, and intercultural understanding.
The exploration of ways in which virtual worlds such as Second Life might be used for experiential learning. Columbia Teachers College has already made a breakthrough in this respect by creating a learning community on a virtual island there.
Alternative strategies in educational assessment in the digital age.
Ideological perspectives on teaching “Englishes” as opposed to a “standard” English.
The role and use of literature in higher education and society.
All in all, it has been a highly useful and rewarding experience for me to be involved in the preparation stages and the running of the institute as well as being one of the participants.
Ece Gülşen
This year I had to say goodbye to a school, which has been more like home to me, and to many people, who have been more like a large family, at the end of five unforgettable years. Now I am a recent graduate of Sabanci University, heading for one of the most prestigious universities in the world—Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a research assistant. Ready for this new challenge in my life, I am looking back at my memories at Sabancı, to see what really brought me here on the way. And I believe I was very lucky to have taken the very first steps at the School of Languages (SL) in 2004.
I say “lucky” in particular, because I was actually accepted as a freshman at the end of ELAE. Nevertheless I was not feeling self confident enough to start an English medium university education and somehow I thought I would miss a lot if I skipped this experience at SL. So I made an official request to the administration, and thanks to their understanding of my wish to improve my second language prior to university courses, I was accepted as an upper level class student for one semester.
Here, I would like to share some of my experience with those who consider being a student at SL or with the lucky ones who already are. First of all, SL is a great transition period from high school to university life. Classes are small and naturally friendships are as intimate as in high school -which is quite rare for a regular university student. Teacher-student interaction and feedback are in the utmost level, both in and out of the classroom; I remember sitting in our teachers’ offices, asking for advice for our personal issues, or even just chatting… Apart from all these, SL facilities are great to improve a second language with audio and video practices. We took our laptops with us every day, and worked on many web-based, interactive exercises as a class. Obviously this did not only help to make progress in our English, but also taught us a lot about how to participate in a group work, to do research on the internet, to find information in an appropriate and fast way. These skills are clearly invaluable for a student at the beginning of his/her university life. Without any hesitation, I can say that getting used to this kind of learning at an early stage was my most important key to the success.
One should know beforehand that second language education at SL is quite different from the traditional style of teaching we all got in our previous schools. The emphasis is not on grammar which is based heavily on memorizing; it is rather on reading and understanding fast, speaking fluently and writing almost perfect. I had some friends who directly started with freshman year and sadly who constantly complained about their heavy schedule for courses which required excessive reading, writing and discussion in English. It is true that Sabancı University is quite challenging -and also encouraging- in its multidisciplinary education. So even if you are an engineering or science student, you will be expected to read, write and discuss a lot in social courses. I may have majored in Materials Science and Engineering, but I definitely enjoyed every single course from humanities, social and political sciences, literature or cultural studies and I never remember a day of complaint because of too much work.
One can still claim that this much of social course load is unnecessary for an engineering/science student, but this is actually completely wrong if you want to continue your education at first class institutions or work at internationally renowned companies. They all look for individuals who can not only communicate very well in the area, but also who can discuss and influence others’ ideas. All these merits are possible with a very good command of English. Let me give an example from my own experience: When applying to graduate schools all over the world, I needed to write many “statement of purpose” letters, to take many interviews via the internet and even needed to go to the USA to be interviewed by the professors at MIT in person. If SL had not given me a chance to learn and practice English with its unique style of teaching, I do not think I would have been offered a dual degree at MIT with full scholarship, accepted by two different departments I have applied: Materials Science & Engineering and Technology & Policy.
Looking back, I guess the longest and most challenging assignment at SL was learning how to teach and improve yourself. Having accomplished this, I was ready for a university life which expected quite a lot from a student. This is why I feel lucky to have taken the first steps at SL and now I am deeply grateful to all my teachers for what they gave me and to my friends for what they shared with me at the School of Languages in 2004.
Enjoy being at SL!
Ece Gülşen
August 10th, 2009 in
SL News |
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SL in Action: A 5-day Trainer Training on Critical Thinking
Müge Bilgiç & Aylin Atikler Yurdacan
Education Reform Initiative (ERI) at SU Istanbul Policy Center in collaboration with the Turkish Ministry of Education and Akbank has launched a project called “Power of Thinking: Teacher Training Support Program for a Youth that Questions” which highlights the importance of questioning and critical thinking among both Turkish students and teachers at primary and secondary level. The main objective of the program is to equip 6600 teachers in 8 cities in Turkey with the ability to implement teaching/learning skills and strategies for critical thinking.
Müge Bilgiç and Aylin Atikler Yurdacan attended one of the series of the trainer training workshops offered by ERI on May 20-24, 2009. The workshop was held in Turkish with a view to providing teachers with critical thinking tools and strategies to be implemented in teaching and learning. The project will be running throughout 2009 in various cities of Turkey in a fashion similar to our MEB/INGED training sessions.
One of the main teaching materials in the workshop was a book entitled Teaching and Learning Strategies for the Thinking Classroom, which is also available at IC as an e-book. We strongly believe that SL teachers and students may usefully benefit from this source as it contains a great variety of effective methods and techniques on teaching critical thinking.
Representations of Turkish Immigrants in Turkish-German Cinema: Tevfik Baser’s 40 Square Meters of Germany and Fatih Akin’s Head-On (Paperback)
Ali Nihat Eken from the School of Languages has recently published with VDM a book entitled “Representations of Turkish Immigrants in Turkish-German Cinema: Tevfik Basers 40 Square Meters of Germany and Fatih Akin’s Head-On“.
Editorial Review: Since their arrival into Germany in the 1960s, Turkish immigrants have always drawn the attention of filmmakers. The German immigrant cinema of the 1970s and 1980s focused on the harsh living and working conditions of these immigrants; however, it very often depicted immigrants in one-dimensional roles. Since the mid-1990s, however, there has been a change in the portrayals of Turkish immigrants in a new wave of films made by young German-Turkish filmmakers challenging cultural stereotypes about Turks. This book examines one film from the earlier phase of migrant cinema – Tevfik Baser’s 40 Square Meters of Germany (1986) and one film from the most recent phase – Fatih Akin’s Head-On (2004) and aims to demonstrate how Turkish immigrants are represented in these films and whether the cinematic representations of the Turkish immigrants have changed over the years.
Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller / Paperback, 80 pages /Language: English
ISBN-10: 363917416X / ISBN-13: 978-3639174168
July 19th, 2009 in
SL Voices |
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Istanbul
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