MSc, Senior Lecturer & the Coordinator of TEFL Graduate Programs. Faculty of Education & Humanities. Suleyman Demirel University, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

AWARDS AND CERTIFICATES:

By the Ministry of Education, Kazakhstan: 

For His Individual Contributions with Innovative Improvements to the System of National Education in Republic of Kazakhstan, Awarded with a “Certificate of Appreciation”. 2013

By the Ministry of Education, Kazakhstan: 

Respected Member/Educator of the Educational Process in Republic of Kazakhstan.

ID number: 00522 Date: December 09, 2002

By the Ministry of Education, Kazakhstan: 

For His Individual Contributions with His Hard Work to the Development of Educational Conditions in Republic of Kazakhstan, Awarded with a “Certificate of Appreciation”. 2005

By local State Education Centers for In-service Teacher Training:

Awarded with Certificates of Success every year until 2006 for having prepared

the award-winning students for Republic School Subjects & Science Olympiad. 

(17 English Language award- winners in RK between 1998 and 2006)

By Higher Educational Institutions for participating and lecturing at seminars and conferences:

Awarded with Certificates of Participation and/or Appreciation 

for having lectured at and contributed to the organization of seminars and conferences at SDU for ELT teachers from schools and universities. 

(Several certificates each year)

For almost three decades, a lot of researchers and practitioners in language education have emphasized the intercultural communicative competence as the primary goal of second and foreign language acquisition. The increasing need to be able to deal appropriately and effectively with cultural diversity has been recognized by the authors and curriculum developers, and included in the curricular programs of language teacher education at higher educational institutions around the world. However, the focus of language learning and teacher education is still the development of grammatical and lexical components of the target language. This is particularly problematic for teaching and learning English, which has been a global language that provides opportunities for interactions across cultures in authentic face-to face or online communication through its local varieties. Having studied many hours of English in traditional teacher-centered classes through grammar-translation in their first language medium, most students lack the minimal level of competence once they are required to start an English-medium program at a university. So much time and efforts seem to have been wasted in case their acquired level of English is not functional. Rather than blaming the dominance of an autocratic and hierarchic value-based education mentality which promotes memorization as the primary means of learning, it would be necessary to educate the language teachers before they start practicing their career. They should have an access to best practices around the world to develop learners’ intercultural competence through active participatory approaches to language teaching. Therefore, we need an innovative model that complies with contemporary ELT theory and practice, that is, a post-modern student-centered approach conducted mostly in an English medium with mainly democratic, global-universal value-based education mentality promoting intercultural communication competence and cognitive aspects of language learning such as critical thinking and participation in authentic interactions in English with reference to the underlying international communicative culture (beliefs, behaviors, and values) as the context of communication.

The International Pedagogical Forum IPF∙2020 will gather the best representatives of the pedagogical community from most countries around the world. Therefore I hope that there will be invaluable opportunities to learn about the pros and cons of the models practiced in other educational contexts. I will also have the chance to share our practice of English language teacher education to promote intercultural perspectives and observe other participants’ feedback on the approaches and methods that we have been using in our university. Whatever we gain after having participated in this Forum will help our institutional community to make better decisions to train the best language educators, who would be cultural ambassadors to international communities where effective and appropriate intercultural communication is a ‘must’.