Middle East Technical University

Department Member, Teaching English As a Foreign Language

Other Affiliations: Middle East Technical University, School of Foreign Languages

Assistant Instructor

About

I’ve been teaching English as a foreign language since 1990, having worked in the Czech Republic, Turkey, and the Sultanate of Oman before coming to Cyprus.
After working at three universities in Cyprus, I decided to branch out and published research into the most commonly used words in English as BNL2709-the essence of English, with my colleague Ali Billuroglu. I went on to found the Lexitronics research group with Dr Nilgun Hancioglu and John Eldridge, and was involved in several other projects as a freelance consultant, such as the eReader project and using a corpus-informed approach to academic writing.  Our Lexitronics group was nominated in 2009 and 2010 for the British Council ELTons Awards in Innovation in English Language teaching.

I continue to be fascinated by vocabulary profiling, data-driven learning and web-based learning environments and have published several articles in these areas with colleagues who share a similar interest. Tom Cobb’s Lextutor website is my one-stop shopping for data-driven learning.

My wife and I left Canada in 1980 to study and live abroad, and we spent eight years in England where I obtained a Master’s degree in Museum studies. My wife studied music in London, and became a Fellow of the Trinity College of Music as well as an Associate of the Royal College of Music.
We’re renovating an old stone ruin in the village of Karsiyaka, and enjoy the quiet village life in our garden with our two cats. We’ve been here since 1995, and hope to make Cyprus our permanent home.

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