The US Department of State recently selected Jimalee Sowell, a PhD candidate in the Composition and Applied Linguistics program, to participate in an exchange program through an English Language Specialist Program project.
This project will focus on preparing English language teachers from the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to present at international conferences. Sowell will guide these teachers through the process of writing conference proposals.
The English Language Specialist Program is a prestigious selection, as this program supports only 150 projects each year. The specialists selected for this program work within communities in over 80 countries. According to the US Department of State, this program gives select scholars and teachers the opportunity to "promote English language learning, enhance English teaching capacity, and foster mutual understanding between the US and other countries through cultural exchange."
Sowell is the president of the Composition and TESOL Association and a member of Phi Kappa Phi. She also works at the Writing Center and serves as the section editor of IUP's Inspiring Pedagogical Connections. She has published several articles, including one in English Teaching Forum in 2019 titled "How to Write an ELT Conference Abstract." Her dissertation is focused on teaching writing within large, multi-level EFL contexts.