Name: Ali Darweesh

Born: 25th June 1979

Ali was born in Aleppo, Syria on June 25, 1979. He has lived all his life in the same city, though he has moved from one flat to another, a third and a fourth so far. He has had several jobs. And in fact his father has done well by sending him to work while he was 11 years old. He worked in furniture painting and decoration. At the same time he started becoming infatuated withy music and language. In fact he had just started learning English at school at that time. While English was one of his favourite subjects at school, he felt affinity with Arabic, the thing that encouraged him to study both and try to conduct a primitive comparative study of both.

During his secondary school, Ali participated in several competitions for short story writers and playwrights. He always came first or second the thing that pushed him to start an acting group (called "Backstage") and toured the state performing farces and other plays.

In fact, this period was of great influence upon his personality since what he learnt about performing arts and literature turned him enthusiastic to learn more about literatures of other cultures and English was the target. Through his participation in the competitions did delay his leaving secondary school for two more years, he managed to get a place at Aleppo University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, English Language Department. However, that stage marked the introduction of computer to his life, the thing that made him think of starting a business in web-design and Internet application development.

The business was not that successful at first because the environment in which he started it was almost blind to that field of investment. Anyway, he worked for a couple of years for some of the companies in Syria that had an IT department and during that period her moved into multimedia development and design and built several web sites and promotional applications. By that time he had also started developing computer-based applications for the purpose of training and learning languages. He built several pieces of software for some publishers who wanted to combine a cd-ROM with their books.

Ali, at the same time, and being away for a while from university, had started working for Kindi International Institute. He worked as an IT trainer. He taught MS Windows, MS Office, graphic design, web design and others. And he tried to apply his knowledge in computer-based training application development to the field of teaching itself, being both a teacher and a developer.

At Kindi, there was a need for a teacher of English. Ali was suggested to start teaching English as well. And it happened that he assumed the role of a teacher of English and at the same time recalled his love to languages. He has been teaching English professionally for more than six years and has joined a publisher and publishing agency in Aleppo that distributes English Language Books (McGraw-Hill).

Through that job, he had the chance to visit several countries and attend several teacher training courses along with ELT marketing techniques and others. This opened the door to him take part as a teacher trainer that offers support on behalf of the agent in Syria to customers and teachers, and to offer guidance, support and consultation to the educational institutions.

Though it took Ali more years to finish his study at university, he was lucky to get a place as an M.A. student in the same faculty in the Literary Studies Section, which he is in right now.

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Ali has finished his first year at the M.A. programme at universty. And now he is preparing his dissertation for the upcoming viva voce. At the same time, he is a fully licenced Sworn Translator and have worked for a while in legal and business translation.