Sara Farsiu

Sara Farsiu is a PhD dissertator in the Second Language Acquisition program. She was born and raised in Iran. Sara comes to UW-Madison after ten delightful years working and studying linguistics and English Philology at the University of Cologne in Germany. She has been teaching Persian and German at UWMadison since fall 2013. She has also worked as a German language teacher and counselor at Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota and German school of Madison; English teacher and counselor in China; and Persian Language Lecturer for the Arabic, Persian, Turkish Language Immersion Institute (APTLII) at UW-Madison. She is now volunteering for a local agency to resettle refugees in Madison. Sara was named a 2016 College of Letters and Science Teaching Fellow. In 2017, she was accepted into the UWMadison Teaching Academy. Sara currently works on documenting the experiences and language trajectories of immigrants and refugees from Iran. This summer Sara will use her SKJ fellowship in Germany to develop her ethnographic dissertation research. She will collect narratives of Iranians who have experienced emigration to learn about their opinions, perspectives, and experiences with using and learning multiple languages. Through this research, she hopes to better understand refugee language learners’ feelings towards their native language(s), the language(s) of the new country, and the linguistic challenges they face in their new country. This research is useful for teachers, educators, and other groups or individuals who aim to improve educational opportunities for refugees from different parts of the world.

Read Sara Farsiu’s fellowship report here.