Dr. Gulsat Aygen:
CITESOL Charter Student

Former Political Prisoner and Med Student from
Turkey Certified to Teach English

by Lilith Haynes, Director of the Institute for English Language Programs

Dr. Gulsat Aygen

The Institute for English Language (IEL) Programs of the Division of Continuing Education sponsors the Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CITESOL) in order to improve the job-hunting chances as well as the professional credentials of members of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) at Harvard who will increasingly teach classes containing large numbers of non-native users of English. To date, two GSAS students have been admitted to the program: Dr. Gulsat Aygen successfully completed her PhD in linguistics and the CITESOL Program in 2002, and Claire Bowern, also a doctoral candidate in the Department of Linguistics, has just fulfilled the CITESOL requirements and will receive her certificate at the 2004 Commencement.

CITESOL is a 15-month program that may be taken only by GSAS students who have passed their general exams. CITESOL requirements consist of:

• the History of the English Language course offered by the Harvard Department of English and American Literature and Language;
• the Introduction to Linguistics course offered by the Harvard Linguistics Department;
• an English for Speakers of Other Languages Methods course offered by IEL;
• a Practicum that involves observation and supervised teaching in IEL, followed by a research paper; and
• team-teaching a section of Intensive Integrated Skills in Harvard Summer School for IEL.

Charter CITESOL recipient Aygen had already completed the first two of the above requirements when she was accepted as a CITESOL candidate, and was therefore able to graduate in one academic year. But her journey from Turkey and a career in medicine to the United States and a PhD in linguistics was not so rapid.

Aygen's father was a man of letters and accorded the high respect paid to teachers in the Turkish culture, and this may have led all three of his children to become teachers, though each had initially chosen a different profession. "My sister Nursat," Aygen says, "studied international business at New York University (NYU), my brother Kursat got his MBA from NYU, and my earlier choice was medicine." Unfulfilled by her original choice of careers, Aygen's sister attended evening school, became a public school teacher, and now teaches underprivileged inner city kids in Washington, DC. Her brother went back to school to get another BA and two more MAs--in mathematics and education--and is now a tutor at the University of Maryland. In Aygen's case, a military coup, which eventually led to her imprisonment as an alleged extremist, cost her the opportunity to become a doctor. With no formal training whatsoever, she made use of her time by teaching English to her cellmates while she was in jail.

"In prison, we were deprived of any contact with the outside world for most of the duration of my stay--six years. No books, not even pens, pencils, or paper were allowed," Aygen recalls. "With no paper and pen, it was quite a challenge." First she taught songs in English to help her students remember the words along with the music. Songs didn't suffice, however, because she couldn't teach spelling. "That left me with the sound system," she said. "That's the first time I thought of phonological rules: Why were we pronouncing the plural suffix in multiple ways?" Her previous experience teaching folk dances also helped. "You can never learn how to dance without dancing: I had to make them speak so that they could learn English." So, Aygen started acting. "I would hold a sweater and say, ‘I am holding a sweater.' I'd make someone else hold it and say, ‘She is holding a sweater.'" Being in a woman's cellblock, there was no "he" to refer to, so Aygen had to find a way to explain the masculine in Turkish. Without realizing it, she had begun to use a linguistic approach to word order; as she continued, her interest in linguistics was piqued. Eventually, Aygen was asked to stop teaching. "These activities created too much laughter and fun in a place where we were supposed to suffer," Aygen said. She even managed to use Morse code to teach English for a time, but when she did not stop, she was isolated.

Once out of prison, Aygen tried her hand at translating, in addition to tutoring high schoolers. She did extensive independent research and study of language teaching and translation, knocking on the door of every good translator she knew to ask for feedback on her work. She contacted professors who had been kicked out of universities after the military coup and had founded a nonprofit, informal, open university, where she took every course they offered. Aygen ended up teaching English to Turkish movie stars and famous businessmen, including executives of multinational companies. She eventually graduated from Bogazici University in Turkey with a BA and an MA in linguistics, but did not have the chance to engage in the formal training necessary to become a certified English as a second language (ESL) teacher.

Aygen received a scholarship to do a PhD in Harvard's linguistics department, but felt that "a double PhD in linguistics and education was not a doable thing" and had all but given up her hopes of becoming a certified ESL teacher. Just as she began her second year at Harvard, however, Aygen says, "I saw that GSAS and the IEL Program were offering the CITESOL to grad students. That was a wonderful day. I ran into my chair's office and told him that I wanted to do it." She applied to the program and was accepted.

"My training has been very special," Aygen says. "With the CITESOL Program, I had the best education I ever experienced. I had a great professor who expected the best. I learned more than I imagined I could through an independent study of the field and various methodological techniques. And, throughout my practical training, I could step into the director's office at any time or bombard her with questions by e-mail and would always get solutions to the problems I encountered. I have learned a lot about professionalism, the value of principles, and working with and learning from colleagues."

Indeed, recognition of her multifaceted and thoroughgoing preparation and experience was quickly earned, for her Summer School students successfully nominated Aygen for the IEL Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001 while she was still a CITESOL student. She received the CITESOL concurrently with a PhD in linguistics at Commencement in June 2002, a feat not only of scholarship but also of logistical planning and speed in traversing the campus to attend two award ceremonies scheduled at the same time. She subsequently taught Intensive Integrated Skills for IEL in the 2002 Summer School session. Aygen's research paper, "The Teaching of the Copula ‘be' and Subject-Verb Agreement in English as a Second Language Programs," which she presented in the IEL colloquium series, displayed a keen sense of the status of research in the field and the shortcomings of theory and practice in second language pedagogy. And during the 2002–03 academic year, in addition to working in the Harvard linguistics department, Aygen taught Integrated Skills for IEL at the intermediate and high intermediate levels, as well as one of IEL's Communication in Business classes. In summer 2003, she also taught a linguistics course in the Harvard Summer School.

In the fall of 2003, Aygen assumed the post of Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Reed College in Oregon. Though she has left Harvard, this IEL charter student carries her CITESOL expertise with her. "Everything I have learned contributes to my scholarly work, both in terms of the broadened perspective into linguistic issues and in terms of actual teaching," she notes. "Although I want to keep teaching theoretical linguistics, I will definitely make use of every opportunity I get to keep teaching IEL. Thanks to the CITESOL Program, I am a better teacher--whatever I teach now."