Aston University, United Kingdom
With 18,000 students from over 120 countries our safe and friendly campus sits in the heart of Birmingham – one of the UK’s most diverse and vibrant cities.
The project team is positioned in the Department of Communication Culture in the School of Law and Social Sciences. The Department has an articulately applied focus, and the various sub-disciplinary areas are engaged in research with social, organisational and educational focus.
The TESOL team within the Department of Communication and Culture has previously led various teacher education projects. These have included a 3-year TEMPUS project led by Professor Sue Garton in collaboration with Pedagogische Hochschule Freiburg Institut für Anglistik. The project involved the design and evaluation of modules for a blended learning MA level programme intended for secondary school teachers in Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. After the successful completion of this project further successful Erasmus and Erasmus+ projects have enabled the TESOL staff to visit the project members in their institutions and take part in the co-teaching of the Master’s level materials. This process has benefited all parties concerned encouraging the TESOL team to get insight into the local practices of teachers in the respective countries. The project members have visited Aston University on many occasions to take part in various professional development activities organised by the TESOL team.
Nur Kurtoglu-Hooton
Nur Kurtoglu-Hooton holds a PhD and is one of the members of the team at Aston University. Her role involves contributing to the design of research-informed, practice-based portfolio of teaching and training as well as reflective and evaluative tools to be employed in the project by all partner institutions and disseminated more widely after the project has been completed.
Muna Morris-Adams
Muna Morris-Adams holds a PhD and is a lecturer at Aston University. My role in the project is to contribute to the design of research-informed and practice-based tools for use in teacher training, with the aim of promoting internationalisation and employability.
Joyce Lim
Joyce Lim holds a PhD and is a Lecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics at Aston University. Her research interests lie in corpus linguistics and language education, particularly in second language writing development. Her role in the project involves evaluating the effectiveness of the toolkit, which was developed from the previous project, and contributing to publishing the final evaluation project.