Erdal Ayan

All About Me

Hi. My name is Erdal Ayan. I am an M.Sc. student at Hacettepe University. Here I sum up my educational and professional background as well as my proficiency in the field of English language teaching as a foreign/second language. During my bachelor education at Karadeniz Technical University, I studied on English language and literature. I attended very informative courses on linguistics, language education and English literature. I also got a formal certificated education on English language teaching as a foreign language. I went abroad as an Erasmus student in 2006. During my Erasmus studentship at TU-Chemnitz in 2006/7, I found opportunity to focus more on language teaching technologies, sociolinguistics and its particular study areas. Accordingly, technology integration to language teaching and linguistics, culture and social studies have been my research/practice areas and interests. I wrote my BA thesis on teaching pronunciation in 2008 and it was then published on-line by IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive at University of Kansas). I got my second bachelor's degree in the department of Sociology of Distance Education Faculty at Anadolu University in 2014. I took English language training courses for TOEFL (iBT) exam at British Culture Language School and Middle East Technical University located in Ankara. I have recently graduated from English language teaching department (M.A. program) at Ufuk University. I finished my M.A. thesis on diagnosing linguistic transfer in September, 2016. During my research for my MA thesis, I have explored Turkish educational system and educational institutions have got a lot to do with linguistic transfer as well as transfer of learning of the participants of the study. As my second Master's degree, I am still studying at the department of Computer Education and Instructional Technologies under Institution of Educational Sciences at Hacettepe University, Turkey. I also attended German language courses in Goethe Institut–Ankara for four years. Now I have intermediate level of German. I participated in many national and international academic activities on language teaching/learning so far. In September, 2011 I took part in Fall School on Multilingualism by LiMA at University of Hamburg in Germany. I am currently an active member of three non-governmental organizations on education, English language teaching and Linux as a free processing software. I have written academic papers on English language teaching, Lexicology, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, English literature, Linguistic Transfer, Collaborated Learning and learning management systems such as Moodle and Oxford English Testing service. Between 2009 and 2015 I worked as an instructor of English at Hitit University in Çorum, Turkey. Nowadays I am a teacher of English and working for a high school for around one year. I have taught English for Turkish learners of English in levels ranging from elementary to upper-intermediate after my graduation from the department of English language and literature. I got education on multimedia language laboratories at Hacettepe University in accordance with the multimedia project held by Turkish Higher Education Council in 2012. I am closely familiar with language teaching technologies and soft-wares such as Moodle, Oxford Testing Service, Sanako, NetLanguages, Adobe Connect as well as Praat, AntConc, JASP, PSPP, for research purposes. I can also use HotPotatoes, eXe learning and many web services such as British Council, BBC English Learning, for educational purposes. I am closely interested in new researches and papers on this field of English language teaching, technological integrations into educational curricula, educational systems, assessment methodologies and corpus linguistics. Therefore, I have been following national and international conferences, academic activities on these subjects and noting active participation for many years now. In July, 2013 I attended an academic conference in Trabzon, Turkey and I presented one of my studies on Moodle's position in the development of autonomy and motivation of the learners. My paper was published by Open Journal of Modern Linguistics. I conducted another study on the integration of Raspberry Pi and Chamilo LMS to English language education at Hitit University for OKUP-2015 in 2015. I have also introduced a bilingual e-bulletin on free/open soft-wares together with my students. Nowadays technology integrated language teaching has been very popular. I believe language education can be supported by new technologies, which may contribute a lot to improve English proficiency of learners, More importantly, technological tools with corpus-based methodologies may help diagnose transfer of learning and to detect linguistic transfer, which was a topic that I studied during my M.A. research. I still keep studying on web-based learning/teaching technologies and improving new curricula for my courses, which could be more beneficial for the learners from different levels of English language. Currently I have been studying on two more academic papers that are going to be published very soon.