Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program Selects 21 Diaspora Fellows to Conduct Projects with Greek Universities

New York, NY, March 21, 2017 – Effie Papatzikou Cochran, Professor in the English Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was awarded a Niarchos Greek Diaspora Fellowship  to travel to Greece and work with the American College of Thessaloniki's English Programs, training English Faculty in Enhancing Student Language Skills Through the Application of "X-Word Grammar."

Professor Cochran will be teaching Sector Analysis (popularly known as “X-Word Grammar”), an editing tool of the English written language, concentrating on the “Sentence.” She will be training tutors and teachers of English as a Foreign Language and will be giving workshops on Sector Analysis to the larger community of teachers of English, offering practical ways of writing error-free sentences in English. 

Professor Cochran is one of twenty-one Greek- and Cypriot-born scholars, hailing from a cross-section of sixteen prominent United States and Canadian universities, who will travel to Greece to conduct academic projects with their peers at Greek universities, working in areas that range from public health to chemical genomics research, and from English language curriculum to continuing education studies in urban food security. Twelve Greek universities were selected by the Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program to host the fellows for collaboration.

The Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program is designed to help avert Greece’s brain drain and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Greece and the United States and Canada. It is managed by the Institute of International Education in collaboration with the Fulbright Foundation in Greece, and funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Over a period of two years, the program will award Fellowships to 40 U.S. and Canadian based academics to collaborate with universities throughout Greece to develop curricula, conduct research, and teach and mentor graduate students in priority areas identified by the Greek universities.

“The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is thrilled both with the appeal and interest the program has generated among academics of the diaspora, as well as the wide ranging expertise of the first round of Fellows,” stated Stelios Vasilakis, Director of Programs and Strategic Initiatives at SNF. “We look forward to these partnerships, which we believe will build long-lasting relationships and be beneficial to all parties involved. We are grateful to the Institute of International Education for their dedication to the program as well as the invaluable input of the esteemed Advisory Council.”

“The Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s generous support for these Fellowships demonstrates the Foundation’s commitment to expanding Greece’s human capital and investing in the country’s long-term economic recovery,” said Allan Goodman, President and CEO of the Institute of International Education.

Professor Cochran holds a Master’s degree in Theatre-in-Education from New York University and a Master’s in TESOL from Hunter College. Her Ed.M and Doctorate in Applied Linguistics are from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her special interests consist of gender, dialects and codeswitching, forensic linguistics, and English grammar. Her article on "Diglossia" appeared in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Professor Cochran co-edited with Yepez a book titled Issues in Gender, Language Learning, and Classroom Pedagogy and is the editor of the CUNY Handbook "Into the Academic Mainstream: Guidelines for Teaching Language Minority Students." She edited an international volume on Mainstreaming, which is part of the "Case Studies in TESOL Practice" series. Dr. Cochran's latest publications are Forensic Linguistics and Pedagogical Implications in Multilingual Contexts chapter 6 (81-99) in Vol. 10 by Springer titled ,"Englishes in Multilingual Contexts: Language Variation and Education" (edited by Ahmar Mahboob & Leslie Barratt) (2014) and The Language of parole: Sex offenders’ discourse strategy use in Indeterminate Sentence Review Board hearings. WORD, 62 (4),  244-267 (Dec. 2016) with Comeau-Kirschner.

She ran a conference on Language and the Law at John Jay for the International Linguistic Association's 50th Anniversary.  Deputy Chair of the English Department for five years, Professor Cochran was named the Distinguished Teacher of the Year, 2005-2006.
 

About John Jay College of Criminal Justice: An international leader in educating for justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York offers a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to upwards of 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations.  In teaching, scholarship and research, the College approaches justice as an applied art and science in service to society and as an ongoing conversation about fundamental human desires for fairness, equality and the rule of law. For more information, visit www.jjay.cuny.edu.