Congratulations to Dr Sultan Turkan, one of the founding members of the Centre for Language Education Research, on her appointment as the next Northern Ireland representative on the BERA Teacher Education SIG. https://www.bera.ac.uk/community/teacher-education-and-development

Dr Turkan specializes in improving educational practices for multilingual immigrant children. Her research is guided by the view of language as a resource for effectively teaching immigrant learners. She has conducted research on the validity and fairness of assessments administered to these learners and their teachers and investigated ways to provide opportunities for immigrant children to demonstrate their funds of knowledge in assessments and classrooms. As lead author of influential papers, she has argued that teachers need to develop specialized knowledge base and set of skills in order for their teaching to attend to the translanguaging practices of the multilingual learners. Current research project examines the development of formative simulated classroom environments for educating science teachers to teach immigrant children. Over a decade now, she has taught various culturally and linguistically diverse learner groups in higher education and foreign/second contexts.