Fethi Çimen
Participant in Engaging Materials for Global English
Summer Workshop
Learner Perspectives
As Fethi Çimen looked out the airplane window at Lake Michigan before joining the Engaging Materials for Global English Summer Workshop he was both excited and exhausted. The joint project by the U.S. Department of State and Iowa State University (ISU) would be a platform for teachers, teacher trainers, and academics from 13 countries to discuss, collaborate, produce, and share our understanding of materials development and technology for English language teaching.
“I arrived in Ames, Iowa after midnight with only a workshop schedule and fatigue from a very long journey from Turkey,” Fethi says. “The next day I met the ISU team and other professionals from all over the world who were also participating in the workshop. As of the first day, it was obvious that everything was very well-organized and under control, so I started to feel more secure and see what was ahead.”
Fethi and the other program participants had sessions in the morning about best practices to use technological tools for English language teaching. In the afternoon, their sessions focused on how to teach English to non-native speakers and put into practice what they had learned in the online course and during the morning workshop sessions.
“It was a nice way to elaborate on whatever had been presented and also to socialize with other English language teachers, administrators, and teacher trainers,” says Fethi. “I was inspired by the way theory was turned into practice, and I will try to remember this while designing classes and teacher training sessions in my own context in Turkey.”
“I was benefiting from the program and making professional progress by implementing the theory we were presented during the workshop, in addition to the materials presented during the 10 week online course preceding the workshop,” Fethi explains.
As a person who sees meeting people of different cultures as priceless, Fethi was pleased to participate in the Engaging Materials for Global English Summer Workshop. Fethi also participated in cultural sessions where he learned about life in Iowa and the U.S. from more than just an academic perspective.
“Everyone was sharing something of their own culture which contributed a lot to our knowledge of world cultures,” Fethi says. “We had wonderful evening chats, making the evening time a true cross-cultural exchange as we were able to share cultural experiences, and educational and professional practices. I was impressed by some of the things I learned from friends and look forward to implementing them in my own context.”
By the end of the three-week workshop, Fethi had achieved a degree of mastery in designing materials such as cartoons, animations, videos, developed and adapted texts, and worked with corpus elements.
“I had learned about many social media websites to teach English language in my own classes, which seem to be increasingly popular as resources for better and effective teaching,” Fethi says. “I learned about more technology, better and appealing materials, more learner autonomy, better control became more likely to be achieved. It was great. The contribution of the program to my professional progress and world cultures was far more than I could have expected.”
By the time the summer was over, Fethi knew he would miss the other teachers and teacher trainers he had met as well as the conversations they shared.
“I owe numerous thanks to the Department of State and Iowa State University for providing me with such a wonderful sharing platform and the opportunity to partake in the Engaging Materials for Global English Summer Workshop,” Fethi says.