Notable Achievement by Our Faculty Member at the Workshop on Good Practices in Higher Education!
The “Workshop on Good Practices in Higher Education” was held on 6 November 2026 at Gaziantep University’s Atatürk Culture Stage. It was organised jointly by Gaziantep University, Hasan Kalyoncu University, SANKO University and Gaziantep Islam Science and Technology University. At the workshop, Assist. Prof. Dr. Zekeriya Durmaz, representing our department’s English Language Teaching Program, received a certificate and an award for his practice titled “From Academic Writing to a TÜBİTAK 2209-A Project: An Integrated Cross-Semester Project Ecosystem.”
The practice led by Assist. Prof. Dr. Zekeriya DURMAZ aims to give pre-service teachers real experience in research and project management during their undergraduate studies. It treats four semesters as one continuous process:
- Second-year spring: Students write research proposals in the EEN201 Academic Writing in English course.
- Third-year fall: In the EMB010 Project Preparation in Education course, these proposals become real applications to TÜBİTAK’s 2209-A University Students Research Projects Support Program.
- Third-year spring and fourth-year fall: Funded projects are carried out under the supervision of an advisor. Each project aims to produce at least one international conference paper and one journal article.
Instructors from the School of Foreign Languages also take part as academic advisors, which has strengthened collaboration between the two units.
The practice has already produced concrete results. In the 2025 2209-A call, 7 of the 15 applications received funding. In the 2026 call, the number of applications rose to 16. These results show that our students’ project-writing skills and their engagement in the process are growing.
Assist. Prof. Dr. Zekeriya DURMAZ received the certificate from Prof. Dr. Bayram ÇETİN, Vice Rector of Gaziantep University. He said the achievement was the result of our students’ hard work and of the joint efforts of all the instructors who contributed to the process. Our department plans to continue its project-based approach to academic development in the coming semesters.
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