Outcome: “Learning Turkish and Turkic Languages on Digital Environment in the United States: Challenges and Opportunities” titled virtual panel discussion presented Knowledge, Shared Experiences and Opportunities on February 20, 2022.

UNESCO’s theme for the 2022 International Mother Language Day (February 21), “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities” encourages the exploration of the potential role of technology in advancing multilingual education and supporting the development of quality teaching and learning for all. The lead-organizer adapted this theme as “Learning Turkish and Turkic Languages on Digital Environment in the United States: Challenges and Opportunities”  in its celebration of the day.
This session on February 20, 2022 presented an academic panel discussion, which explored UNESCO’s overall theme on the following two points:
• Enhancing the role of teachers in the promotion of quality multilingual teaching and learning in correlation with teaching Turkish and Turkic Languages in the United States
• Reflecting on technologies and its potential to support multilingual teaching and learning along with presented challenges. #IMLD2022
The session was jointly organized by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA);
The Light Millennium, Charitable Global Human Advancement Organization (LMGlobal) and
Turkish Women League of America (TWLA/ATKB), which are associated with the United Nations Department of Global Communications (UNDGC); and American Turkish Association of Southern California (ATA-SC).
Presented virtually on February 20, 2022. | Logo #UNESCO
Booklet of the Webinar: https://lightmillennium.org/events/2022/imld-turkish-turkic-languages-booklet-v7-final.pdf
Video (Session-II) | Video (Session-I)

Session-II: Introduction by Bircan Ünver

Thank you very much for being with us back-to back two sessions along with we’d like to Welcome to our new guests for this particular session.

I am Bircan Ünver, Founder-President of The Light Millennium Organization and Chair of the ATAA Committee on UN Relations.

Now, we are excited to present the second session on the 2022 International Mother Language Day, which is titled, “Learning Turkish and Turkic Languages on Digital Environment in the United States: Challenges and Opportunities”.

As it is indicated in the prior session, this session will be an academic panel and our Keynote Speaker is Professor Feride Hatiboğlu.

Without further notice, I would like to introduce our moderator Professor Sibel Erol

Sibel Erol holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California,Berkeley. She has taught comparative literature, women’s studies and Turkish at UC, Berkeley and Washington University in Saint Louis before joining New York University where she’s a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and teaches Turkish language and literature. She works on a variety of authors and genres. Her most recent publication is an edited collection of articles on Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow: Kar Üzerine Yazılar (Writings on Snow).

Welcome to Prof. Sibel Erol. Thank you for leading the second session.

Now, I’d like to hand the session to Prof. Erol. Over to you.

Welcome everybody! We’ve gathered today to celebrate the International Mother Language Day, which is observed every year on February 21st to promote linguistic and cultural diversity, multilingualism (which is the co-existence of many languages alongside each other), and the right to education in one’s mother language. The initiative was first proposed by Bangladesh to the UNESCO General Conference, and was accepted in 1999. Consequently, International Mother Language Day has been celebrated all through the world since 2000. UNESCO believes in the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity for societies to be sustainable. This belief highlights UNESCO’s mandate for peace and its goal to preserve the differences in cultures and languages in order to foster tolerance and respect for others. We approach today’s celebration in that same spirit.

Although this is my first experience as a moderator, I’ve attended two previous celebrations of the Mother Language Day in New York in events spearheaded by the Light Millennium. The very last celebration I attended in 2019 was focused on the works of the poet Atilla İlhan, with community members from all walks of life reading their favorite Atilla İlhan poems. Children -and also some adults- in the first session of today’s celebration, in a way, replicated this with their delightful readings, showing poetry’s power both as a personal expression of feeling and as a social connector bringing people together through expressive use of language in a shared performance.

Today, we’re meeting on zoom as a much wider community, with a much wider audience than that celebration in 2019. The fact that this meeting is taking place over zoom is very much in keeping with the theme of 2022 International Mother Language Day. Each year UNESCO proposes certain themes to be discussed during world- wide celebrations. The theme this year is about the use of technology and the role of teachers in creating a multilingual learning and teaching environment. We will be taking up these themes in the keynote speech coming up and in our panel presentations that follow it.

Let me now introduce our distinguished keynote speaker, Prof. Feride Hatipoglu, who is the president of AATT (the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages, which very early on replaced Turkish with Turkic in its name with a tip of the hat to the multilingual context of Turkish). I’m very proud to be a member of this association myself.

Our keynote speaker Prof. Hatiboglu teaches modern Turkish language and culture as well as Ottoman Turkish courses at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s taken an interesting and a circuitous path to teaching language and culture. She holds a law degree from the Faculty of Law at Istanbul University, and a Ph.D. in Banking & Insurance from Marmara University. This stellar background and the combination of law and finance offer her a unique perspective on the material, financial and justice questions and constraints shaping education. In addition to being the President of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages (AATT), she is: a member of the American Research Institute in Turkey, Ottoman Turkish Studies Association, Middle East Studies Association, and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. She also has full Oral Proficiency Interview and Writing Proficiency Test Certifications for Turkish from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Let me now leave the floor to Prof. Hatiboglu, who I’m thrilled to call a colleague and a friend.

• Please click on here for Prof. Feride Hatiboğlu‘s presentation (pdf).
• Voice-Recording: https://www.lightmillennium.org/events/2022/imld-feride-hatipoglu.mp3

1-Professor Timur Kocaoğlu:

Let’s now turn to our panel, and to our first panelist, Prof. Timur Kocaoğlu, who is an embodiment of multilingualism all by himself; he speaks eight languages.

Professor. Timur Kocaoğlu holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Middle East Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. He’s taught Turkish as well as Uzbek, Kazakh, and other Turkic languages; literature, culture, and history of the Turkic peoples as well as international relations at Marmara and Koç Universities in addition to Michigan State University. His publications include a phrasebook of Turkic languages, Uzbek riddles from Afghanistan, and English translations of poems from Central Asian Turkic poets. His most recent publication is a co-authored book entitled “Making Russia and Turkey Great Again” issued in (2021). The title of his presentation is (please click on the following link for the presentation): “Turkish/Turkic Languages, Online Teaching, and Opportunities.”

• Please click on here for Prof. Timur Kocaoğlu’s presentation. (as web page)

• Voice-recording: https://www.lightmillennium.org/events/2022/imld-timur-kocaoglu.mp3

II- Professor Müge Satar:

We’re very lucky to have Professor Müge Satar with us today. She is the very person to address issues of technology in learning as an expert, specifically as a researcher and teacher of these very questions guiding our discussion today. Professor Satar teaches Applied Linguistics and TESOL- (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages in case you’re not familiar with the acronym) at Newcastle University, in the UK. She works on the communicative and pedagogical aspects of multimodal interaction for online language learning and teaching. Her research interests include Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), and in particular Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). She is the co-editor of the Journal of Virtual Exchange and has publications in leading journals in the field such as, Language Learning and Technology, ReCALL, and System. In addition to this research expertise, she has quite a lot of experience in teaching Turkish and English at the college, high school and adult education contexts.

Her presentation today is entitled: “Learn language through culture: The ENACT web app,” ENACT being a project funded by the European Union, of which she is the principal investigator. 

• Please click on here for Prof. Müge Satar’s full presentation (in pdf)
• Voice-recording: https://www.lightmillennium.org/events/2022/imld-muge-satar.mp3

III- Professor Güliz Kuruoğlu:

Our last presentation will be given by Professor Güliz Kuruoğlu, who is retired from UCLA. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in Turkic Languages and Linguistics. She first taught linguistics at Boğaziçi University, and then went on to teaching Turkish language, literature and culture in addition to Turkic languages and cultures at universities in the US, such as UC Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, and UCLA. She served on influential and key committees developing Turkish and Uzbek proficiency guidelines, in establishing a Language Learning Framework for Turkish, and developing National Testing for Turkish. At UCLA she developed web based listening modules for Turkish called the “Turkish Tutor” as well as listening modules for the Azerbaijani language.

Prof. Kuruoğlu is another colleague that I’m honored to call a friend. Right out of grad school I worked on that committee for writing a Language Learning Framework for Turkish under her leadership. The project was funded by the AATT and proposed by the AATT’s visionary leader and mentor Erika Gilson. Our report was the first of its kind for teaching any Middle Eastern language in the US, and provided proficiency level standards, curricular guidelines, information about teaching methods and available materials. These have been more recently updated by our AATT colleagues. As I’ve said Prof. Kuruoğlu has done this kind of standard setting on other committees which are crucially important in creating an academic and professional field and its knowledge content. It’s with great pleasure that I yield the floor to now Prof. Kuruoğlu.

• Please click on here for Prof. Güliz Kuruoğlu’s speech.

• Voice-Recording: https://www.lightmillennium.org/events/2022/imld-guliz-kuruoglu.mp3

Conclusion

Today our keynote speaker Prof. Feride Hatipoglu talked about how Turkish is taught in the US, addressing issues of student motivation, materials, the use of technology and available internet platforms. She also introduced the AATT, of which she’s the president. In our academic panel, the discussion focused on teaching and learning Turkish as both a mother language and a foreign language. Prof. Timur Kocaoğlu’s presentation covered the ways of classifying and describing Turkish as well as the list of the universities where it is taught in the US. Next Professor Müge Satar introduced the “Enact app” for learning a language (currently 18 of them) through learner-centered, cultural arts and crafts activities, which, for example, offers the activity of making Karagöz puppets for Turkish. In the last presentation of this panel, Prof. Güliz Kuruoğlu talked about her experiences and more generally about the teachers’ perspective of teaching Turkish as well as about the profile of and the challenges faced by students learning Turkish in the US. In keeping with the questions posed by UNESCO for this year, the presentations today also emphasized opportunities, characterizing technology as a means of reaching wider and more various audiences, and touched on new ways of doing so, such as through interactive apps, new websites and new materials. This discussion will go on as both opportunities and challenges, such as disparities in internet access, grow.

So, thank you for coming, listening, participating today. Thank you to our keynote speaker and to all of our panelists. Have a happy mother language day!

Video – Session-II

Video-Session-I

Keynote by Prof. Feride Hatiboğlu
https://www.lmglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/prof-feride-hatiboglu-intl-language-day-feb-20-2022.pdf

Panelist: Prof. Timur Kocaoğlu

Panelist: Prof. Müge Satar

https://www.lmglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/muge-satar-mother-language-day-2022-enact.pdf

Panelist: Prof. Güliz Kuruoğlu

Booklet: https://lightmillennium.org/events/2022/imld-turkish-turkic-languages-booklet-v7-final.pdf

https://www.ataa.org/press-releases/learning-turkish-and-turkic-languages-on-digital-environment-in-the-us

www.lmglobal.org | www.turkishlibrary.us | www.ataa.org | www.atkb.org