Aliya Zholdabayeva
2022 IVLP Impact Award Project: English Language Learning and AcquisitionKazakhstan
Aliya Zholdabayeva was born in Pavlodar City, Kazakhstan. She has worked as a university lecturer for more than 20 years and enjoys sharing her knowledge with her students. Aliya graduated from the Pedagogical Institute with honors and immediately started her teaching career. Since August 2019, she has been the head of the Department of Foreign Languages at Pavlodar Pedagogical University. Their program prepares future teachers to successfully teach foreign languages, like English, German and Chinese.
In 2012, Aliya won the Presidential International Scholarship funded by the Kazakhstani Government to study in the United Kingdom. She completed her master’s program at the University of Reading in England. Her thesis covered the issue of multilingual education in Kazakhstan, and the topic of her dissertation was “Parents’ attitudes towards a multilingual approach of education beginning from primary school level in the context of the Republic of Kazakhstan." Aliya graduated from the University of Reading with a Master of Arts in applied linguistics.
IVLP Impact Award Project: English Language Learning and Acquisition
This project offered English language courses to improve and support language skills of university students in Kazakhstan from Ukraine, Mongolia, and Uzbekistan. The project activities focused on augmenting participants' speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills.
English is one of the most popular and demanded languages in the global world. It is a language of science, medicine, media, intercultural communication. Currently, many films, TV shows, books and music are published and produced in English. English is also the language of the internet. A great number of people use the internet every day and about half of the world’s most visited websites are displayed in English. By understanding English, the students of this project will not need to rely on translations and subtitles anymore and can thrive in new personal and professional experiences.
Through her project’s weekly classes, Aliya helped improve the English language skills of 20 university students from Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia and 12 young Ukrainian children living in Kazakhstan. Due to her project, many participants that could not communicate in English before could communicate using vocabulary and grammar structures without the help of virtual translation applications on their phone. The classes were active and gave the students the confidence to no longer be nervous when speaking English.
"Visiting speaking club was an exciting and very useful thing, because you may speak and listen to the other students in an informal atmosphere. The topics were so interesting and very helpful, because you may use the lexical and grammatical structures in every-day situations." - Project participant
IVLP Exchange Experience
Aliya was a participant in the IVLP Project Digital Education in the US in 2021, organized by the U.S. Department of State and Meridian International Center.
U.S. Communities Visited Virtually
Washington, DC; Baltimore, MD; Charlotte, NC