PULLMAN, Wash. – Joy Egbert, professor of education at Washington State University, will travel to Turkey this fall to share her expertise in using technology to teach the English language.
She will deliver the plenary address and conduct several workshops at a teaching conference in Samsun, a central coastal city on the Black Sea. From there, she will go east to the cities of Van and Diyarbakir to lead workshops for teachers and student teachers. It will be her second trip to the region to work with Turkish educators.
The Nov. 9-22 trip is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Office of English Language Programs. In 2011, Egbert led the State Department’s Afghan eLearning Support Project, for which WSU’s College of Education was the contractor.
“For the Afghan project, we developed a computer-assisted curriculum for 10 levels of English learning that I’ll share with the teachers in Turkey,” Egbert said. “It contains hundreds of resources that they can use even when their Internet isn’t functioning or they have a limited number of computers.”
Though Van and Diyarbakir are located in poorer regions of Turkey, the country’s Ministry of Education and Council of Higher Education are making computers, tablets and smart boards more available there.
According to the State Department, eastern Turkey is a place where Americans are generally held in low regard. Egbert’s role as an English language specialist offers an opportunity to build relationships there.
“I’m hoping to make connections that will result in ongoing collaborations between WSU and the teachers in Turkey,” Egbert said. “I would love to set up some interaction between our pre-service teachers and theirs. We have so much to learn from each other.”