Team

Dr. Osman Solmaz is the director of the project and mainly responsible for implementing the project. He conducted part of his Masters’ thesis research at SUNY Albany, New York as a visiting scholar, and received his Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from an interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Arizona thanks to Fulbright scholarship. Since his return to Turkey, he has been working at his alma-mater, Dicle University at the Department of English Language Teaching where he engaged in a number of academic and community service projects. Recently, he directed US Embassy-supported “English Language Teaching through Linguistic Landscapes” project which run between 2019 and 2020.

Özge Öztürk is a Phd student at the Department of English Linguistics at University of Hamburg, Germany. Currently, she is working on her Phd thesis which focuses on the role of English and multilingualism at higher education contexts. Her research interests also include sociolinguistics, multilingualism, the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in language learning and teaching. She has more than ten years of teaching experience in EFL higher education context and also in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. In terms of international experience, she has been to the US as a participant of a study programme sponsored by the Department of State and to Denmark as an Erasmus student. She attended teacher training courses in the UK and is an experienced conference speker in the area of teacher training especially in the EFL area. She also worked as a sign language interpreter for the International Olympic Committee and attended Deaflympic games as an international sign language interpreter. She knows Turkish and Turkish sign language, English, German and International sign language (ISL). Her ongoing project with the U.S Department of State is "Virtual Professional Learning Network Project" for language teachers aiming to create virtual professional development opportunities with the trainers from the United States

Finishing the department of Travel and Tourism Management, Vedat Kızıl graduated from Muğla University in 2005. In addition, he has a bachelor degree in International Relations and Issues from Anadolu University. What's more, he got his bachelor degree in Teaching English as A Second or Foreign Language from Dicle University in the years between 2016-2019. Working in many places including TRT as a television presenter, radio talk show host, news anchor and radio presenter, he also worked for the Ministry of Justice as a curtisor for 5 years. Furthermore, thanks to his proficiency, he worked for many hotels as a front office coordinator. Having worked as a freelance teacher in Diyarbakır in the past, he has worked in many language centres and schools as an English Language Teacher professionally in the years between 2016-2019 and 2020. As an English Language teacher, he was the active part of New Age Teachers Club in Dicle University in the years between 2016-2019. Currently, he is working as an English Language Teacher in the Ministry of Education.

Kardelen Aslan is currently studying at the department of English Language Teaching at Dicle University. Being the youngest TESOL holder in Diyarbakir in 2018, she attended the webinars and the workshops, conducted by Dicle University and Texas Christian University, on Linguistic Landscapes as a student in addition to the conference on Linguistic Landscapes with a presentation titled "Airport Signs As A Valuable English Language Teaching Material" in December 2020. In addition, she was a participant in Dialogic Teaching in English Language Teaching course with the collaboration of TUBITAK and Van Yüzüncü Yıl University in April 2021. Besides, in the 7th Annual ELT Undergraduate Students Conference conducted by Sakarya University, she was one of the speakers with a presentation on The Developing English Language Teachers. Being a student in the course of Teaching Grammar Communicatively conducted by the US Embassy and World Learning SIT Graduate Institute as an Online Professional English Network course, she presented her post­course presentation titled with Dialogic Teaching and Teaching Grammar Communicatively in June 2021. What's more, she was an active attendee in TESOL Elevate Conference on 26- 30 July 2021.