Z'report

 Who plans your career? Is it you? Your family? Your teacher?  When do you start planning your career? Is it when you are a high school student or a college student? When does it end? When you are retired? We found answers for those questions in the second week of Yetkin Gençler . Let's look at those answers together! Career planning is an ongoing and never-ending process which is developing and changing over time. It starts at a very young age, when you start to think about your future in your childhood. So, you start planning your career when you are a school-age child. Yes, it's YOU planning it. Nobody else can plan it for you but they can only guide or assist you during the process. You keep planning it until you keep contributing to the society. The keys to career planning are: - your assets (competencies, knowledge, experience, network) - your aspirations (vision, goals) - market realities (what will the companies pay you for) You should be aware of your strengths and w...

  Hi everybody! I have some great news. I have joined the Product Marketing internship program in RadicalX . I will  acquire the skills, mindset, and network to be a high-impact team member at innovative companies. In this program, I will be working in an interdisciplinary tech team with peers from more than 125 countries.  Our marketing team, Advertax, is responsible for launching the Group Virtual Internships. Our mission as marketers and designers is to develop a marketing strategy to increase the popularity of the RadicalX internship programs, raise brand awareness and increase web traffic.   Our deliverables for the first week are doing market research and building marketing strategies. I will share some of my notes from learning resources that helped me learn about market research and strategies. How to do market research The business that best understand their customer wins. You have to understand their wants needs and goals. Amazon : shows what your customer...

 Hello friends! Today, I'll be sharing my notes on Receiving and Giving feedback from an article written by Prof. Dr. Acar Baltaş. The article starts with a question: "Can the personality be changed within time?" I thought it would be. However, Baltaş says it's the actions that are changing, not the personality coming with genetics. Some factors causing a change in our actions are: - time - traumas -psychotherapy - feedback Feedback plays a crucial role for the personal growth. We should get the maximum benefits from feedbacks but there are some points that should be taken into consideration while giving and receiving it. There is a misconception of that one with more experience or at an older age knows better. It is a huge misconception because the experience might be negative; repeated mistakes are also accepted as an experience. We should receive feedback from people regardless of their age and experience. Everyone has a different point of view.  There is another i...

 Hello folks! We had the second session about Learning How to Learn, Time Management and Note-taking skills in the YetGen Orientation Program with Dear Murat Yalnızoğlu.  We identified the ways to gaining a competence, which are motivation, information (background knowledge) and intelligence. One of the key competences for the 21st century is effective communication. In order to be an effective communicator; we have to listen actively, ask proper questions, tell a story, explain solutions, have good presentation skills, give and receive feedback. Later on, we distinguished the differences between competence and intelligence.  While competences can be acquired and improved at any age, intelligences are innate cognitive and mental capacity. Here is a chart of multiple intelligences: People are born with all the multiple intelligences; yet, while some are improved, some are rasped according to their life experiences.  As stated before, motivation is the key in order to ...

 Hi there! I am back again with some exciting news. I have joined MZV-MEF  Yetkin Gençler  (YetGen) 21st Century Training Program as a trainee. YetGen is an extensive 14-week 21st Century Skills Training Program which includes trainings like Leadership, Effective Presentation Skills and Teamwork, Content Writing, Career Planning, Excel, Digital/Information Literacy, Algorithmic Thinking, Sustainability and Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The training was founded by Prof. Dr. Erhan Erkut. We have already had the first session yesterday. I will be sharing my notes and my whole learning journey with you. Firstly, we focused on the concept of the ' Quality Education ' with our trainer Erhan Erkut. The UN describes the goal of Quality Education as ensuring “inclusive and equitable quality education and [promoting] lifelong learning. Let's have look at whether this is the case in Turkey :) The dropout rate is quite high in Turkey and the nu...

     Hello dears! How have you been? I have great news for you. We had the last presentation meeting with all the groups and our instructors. As you know, I have been working at my dear instructor Melda YILMAZ's PhD research project, 21st century Skills Training and Project Based Learning , for 11 weeks. After our intensive 6-week theory-based training program, we had a 5-week practice and product creation section. In the first section, we worked on various skills and topics such as global language, critical thinking skills, digital literacy skills, information literacy skills and in the second section, we designed a website as a product. You can learn about the whole process by reading my previous blog posts. Today, I will briefly explain our website, also mention about my friends' products and I'd like to talk about my overall opinions about the program.     We created our website on ' English As a Global Language and Its Pedagogical Implications ' topic ...

     Hi everybody! Hope you're all doing well. This is the last week of our project. We'll present our websites next week and happily, we are almost done with creating our content for the website.         We, the team ELT-Z (this is how we call ourselves hahaha), had several meetings with my teammates this week. We reviewed our research papers one last time and we figured out creating our conclusion and further suggestions part by using multimedia tools. We had a meeting which lasted an hour, we talked about the conclusions of our papers and suggested some ideas for our further recommendations. We love to share ideas since we get very creative ideas while discussing. Then, we divided the roles again: Bilge and Zeynep Ahsen were supposed to gather all the conclusions and create a video on Animoto  and share it on Youtube. As the website doesn't allow to share videos, we're going to share the link. Meanwhile, Öken and I were supposed to create furth...

      Hello again my dear readers! I hope you are all fine and you enjoy your time. I was busy with my final exams for the last two weeks so I was not available here but don't worry I'll let you know about the updates of our project. As we were going to be busy with the finals, we agreed on postponing the deadline of writing our research papers with my teammates.  I will upload my blog and share the link of my paper when I post it on our website yet, for now, I will share the key points of my research.      In Turkey, students start to learn English starting from the age of 8 and they receive a high exposure to the language; however, learning English is still problematic. One of the main reasons is that  English is taught as a subject lesson instead of as a tool of communication. Students know the grammatical system of the language yet they cannot use them in practice of speaking. For instance,while they can fill in the blanks by using present pe...

Image resource https://kell0w.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/6a00d83451ccbc69e20111685e8760970c-400wi1.jpg Multimodal Discourse Analysis considers how texts draw on modes of communication such as pictures, film, video, images and sound in combination with words to make meaning. It considers how multimodal texts are designed and how semiotic tools such as color, framing, focus and positioning elements contribute to the making of meaning in the text. (Othman, 2017) Halliday offers three types of social meanings, or metafunctions in the use of language, which are ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction. These metafunctions help us analyze different discourses such as commercial campaigns and advertisements. For instance; looking at the Arby’s ad, we observe that there are a pair of hands crossed in the center, covering up the product, which evokes us the way women hide their breasts. Around the hands, there is light brown shading, as though the produc...

      Hello dears! How have you been? I was ghosted for a while since I was busy with my research on English Language Teaching Practices in Turkey. As you know, we shared the tasks with our group members and each of us is to search different sub-topics  so that we have a great advantage in time. As we have a limited time to create our website, searching for the same topics and trying to write a research paper with three other people would be a waste of time. Therefore, I am very satisfied with this decision we made with my teammates. After we conclude writing our papers, we will meet and suggest solutions for the problems we identified during our research and create activities.      Now, I'd like to tell you about my week of research. My topic was ELT Practices in Turkey so, I was supposed to search for how English was being taught in Turkey. I did my research by using Google Scholar. I read tens of articles on the topic and I saved those articles on M...

  Hello darlings! How have you been? As you know, we have finished the first module of our training program. The theory part is over and now it is time to create a website and apply what we have learned. We had several meetings with our group members this week. Firstly, we decided on our main topic for the website easily. We were just not sure about our implication. We agreed on working on English as a Global Language since all of us were interested in this topic and it was one of the main issues we focused on during the training program. It’s a contemporary topic and it indicates the main features of English in 21st century that’s why wanted to extend our knowledge and work on it.  We will present our topic from general to specific. So, English as a Global Language is our umbrella term. We will search the ELT practices all over the world and in Turkey context. We will explain Standard English and the effects of teaching standard English both all over the world and in Turkey. ...

  Welcome again! After the final session of our teacher training, we designed an activity under the title of ‘Global English’ as team ELT Z. For the process of preparation, we met on Zoom at 2pm and had approximately two hours of meeting to brainstorm, exchange ideas and distribute the duties. We wanted to use what we learned during the sessions of teacher training while trying to maintain World Englishes as the main focus. After sharing various precious ideas and placing most of our thoughts on the project, we decided to benefit from Lino.it and IDEA: International Dialects of English Archive as the materials we learned through the teacher training sessions. Here comes our activity below, take care! XOXO,  Team ELT Z   Global English Activity of “ELT Z” Designed by: Bilge Güral, Zeynep Ahsen Karasoy, Öken Demir, Zeynep Çetintaş Classroom setting: 20 students  Level: B2+/C1  Skills: Speaking, Listening *It is assumed that the students are being taught ‘B...

     Hi folks! How have you been? Today, I'll be sharing my reflections on Week 6, which was the last session of our first module. I still remember our first meeting in this training program. I have always been eager to attend to the meetings and been looking forward to get in discussions. The team was full of bright ideas and I was always learning something new or extending my ideas. I also sincerely thank our dear instructor Melda Yılmaz. It was a very well-structured program: each activity, each detail was created and selected on purpose. I have learned a lot in this process. Now, it is time to apply what I have learned.     In this session, we basically talked about EIL (English as an International Language). We based our discussions on Aya Matsuda's Teaching Materials in EIL (I highly suggest you to read it to learn about material evaluation) The main aim of EIL is to prepare the learners to use English in order to become a part of globalized world.   ...