Yasemin Yıldız was born and raised in London as an English-Turkish bilingual, and educated in the UK. Her first name ‘Yasemin’ is internationally recognised, and thus pronounced or spelt in differing ways, yet the two phonetic variants she uses interchangeably include: /jɑ.se. ˈmin/ with her Turkish accent, or /ˈjæz.mɪn/ with her British English (BE) accent. Her surname ‘Yildiz’ (without a dot in Turkish orthography) is of Turkish origin, meaning: ‘Star’ and pronounced interchangeably as /jɯl.ˈdɯz/ with her Turkish accent or /ˈjiːl.diz/ with her BE accent.
Yasemin Yildiz received her B.A. degree in English Language, Literature and Linguistics from the University of Westminster in 1998. She then moved to the University of Essex, where she completed her postgraduate education, in the Department of Language and Linguistics. She obtained her M.A. degree with a ‘Distinction’ in Descriptive and Applied Linguistics in 2002, with her dissertation entitled “Language Contact and Phonological adaptation: A Sociolinguistic study of language use by three generations of English-Turkish bilinguals living in London”. She then received her Ph.D. in Linguistics in 2006, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Scholarship. Her doctoral thesis was entitled as “Age Effects in the Second Language Acquisition of English Onset Clusters by Turkish Learners: An Optimality-Theoretic Approach”. She also holds a Trinity College London Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).
Currently, she is teaching at The British University in Dubai (BUiD), Department of Education, TESOL Program. Before joining BUiD in Summer 2012, she was a member of faculty at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, at the rank of Assistant Professor of Linguistics, where she taught a range of courses in Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Phonetics, Language Transfer, Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics between 2008-2011. She also taught briefly at the University of Essex, in the Language and Linguistics Department in 2005, and Beykent University, Istanbul, in 2007.
Her research interests include second language acquisition, phonetics, phonology, language contact, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, language disorders and special education. Currently she is particularly interested in conducting inter-/multi-disciplinary research that seeks to find ways of putting linguistic theory into practice. Her language specialization is English and Turkish Linguistics. Her scholarly work has been published in leading international journals and books, and she has also acted as a reviewer for The Language Learning Journal and Essex Graduate Papers in Language and Linguistics.
Currently she is also an Associate Editor for Open Access Books program in Linguistics of Versita de Gruyter Publishing.
Further information for academic and research background of Dr. Yildiz can be viewed from her CV.
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