Graduate Student, Curriculum & Instruction
Ozge Evcen is a doctoral candidate in Language and Literacy. She is originally from Turkey and moved to the U.S. in 2010. Her research focuses on heritage language speakers with a particular emphasis on children’s language and culture, curriculum design, family involvement, heritage language acquisition, and bilingualism. She has worked as a Turkish Language Instructor for Turkish Studies Programs for all levels in the Linguistics department at UIUC. She has served as a TA for elementary education program courses where she had many opportunities to work with pre-service teachers. Prior to entering the program, Ozge worked for nine years in Teaching English as a Second Language field as a college level language instructor, advisor, curriculum specialist, and coordinator in various institutions including elementary school, a public university and a private university in Turkey. She spent two years in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program at the University of Mississippi for her MA degree. She was an instructor working with K-12 school kids in the Community-university partnership project at the University of Mississippi. She worked for the Bureau of Educational Research at the College of Education to develop an interactive web-based system to establish research collaborations between local K-12 schools and researchers from across the University of Illinois campus.