I obtained my BA in English Language Teaching from Marmara University, İstanbul, after which I got my MA in English Language Teaching from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. As I was working on my degree, I worked as an English as a Foreign Language tutor and teacher for a very short time. Then I worked as a research (and sometimes teaching) assistant at the undergraduate program in English Language Teaching at Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul.
Soon after finishing my MA, I relocated to the Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL, Georgia State University, for my Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. During my time there, I worked as a research assistant to help department professors with their research in the areas of corpus analysis and online course design and taught undergraduate-level theoretical and applied linguistics, pre-service and in-service English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher training courses, and academic English as a Second Language (ESL). I finally finished my doctoral dissertation in the summer of 2020 and graduated a couple of months later.
I graduated at a time when we all were experimenting with this new normal, and I wanted something familiar among all the novelties the pandemic gifted us. So, I came back to Turkey, and as of December 2020, I started working as a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages at Yıldız Technical University. Also, since March 2021, I have been teaching undergraduate composition to undergraduate history and foreign language education students at Boğaziçi University.
...since my entire professional life has been about applied linguistics, I think it's about time I shared more about my experience as a novice applied linguist, academic, researcher, and teacher! : )
Feel free to explore the webpage and contact me at yilmazs@yildiz.edu.tr if you have questions, comments about the content on here.