Sakayan is noted for pioneering Armenology in Canada and for her books and articles published in her series "Armenian Studies for the English-speaking World."
She grew up in a multilingual environment, with her first languages being Western Armenian and Modern Greek, and received early exposure to German, French and Turkish.
In 1948, she was admitted to the Yerevan State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages (YSPL) where she graduated with a diploma in Germanic linguistics and in Pedagogy in 1952.
Over the following four years, she shared her time between Moscow and Yerevan to pursue her teaching duties in Germanic Philology at YSU and complete her PhD thesis while raising her two young children.
Due to her high ratings as an instructor of German at McGill, in 1978 she was offered a joint appointment with the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies where she taught for ten years.
At the Centre of Continuing Education, she founded and supervised a program of credited Armenian courses anchored in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies.
[25][26][27][28][29] However, in accordance with Soviet censorship rules that deprived expatriate authors of authorship, the production of all books carrying her name had to be discontinued after Sakayan's departure to Canada in 1975.
In close collaboration with Professor Christine Tessier of Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada, Sakayan conducted the research project dedicated to German Stereotyped Speech Forms in Mini-Dialogues.
Sakayan and Tessier laid the groundwork for a new method of communicative exercises that has received widespread recognition in the area of DaF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache, or German as a Foreign Language).
The innovative method is based on the introduction of German Stereotyped Speech Forms, or gambits, known for their important role in languages while turn-taking in interaction.
The method broadly applies speech act theory and text linguistics, as well as some insights of "grammar of expectancy," to the teaching of DaF.
The Rede und Antwort exercises have proven to be an effective means for promoting oral skills in the classroom, which are readily applicable in real life-settings.
It also applies the insights of text linguistics and grammar of expectancy by enhancing the production of correct grammatical forms anticipated by the reproduction of certain ready-made routine formulae.
These twin Armenian textbooks are considered to be the highlight of Sakayan's career, reflecting a lifetime of pedagogical and scholarly experience in foreign language teaching and research in applied linguistics.
The journal is a chronicle of the Smyrna catastrophe of 1922, which describes how the ancient port city in Asia Minor was destroyed by a massive fire, whereby the entire Christian population was either massacred or forced to flee.
All volumes include a detailed biography of the author, a literary analysis of the journal in an expanded introduction, 52 annotations of an historical and cultural nature, an afterword, and a bibliography.
[33][34][35][36][37] Sakayan is also the editor-in-chief of an important book documenting the Armenian genocide: the newest edition of Theodik's (Theodoros Lapchindjian) book Memorial to April 11 (Armenian: Յուշարձան ապրիլ 11-ի- Hushartsan Abril 11-i), which was created with the assistance of renowned journalist and human-rights activist and publisher Ragip Zarakolu (Istanbul: Belge Publishers) and appeared in 2010.
[38] This book was first compiled and published in Turkish by Theodik in 1919 in Istanbul to pay tribute to the murdered intellectuals and community leaders of 1915—writers, journalists, editors, clergymen, academics, teachers, and jurists.
[39] Over the last two decades, Sakayan has been working on a translation project with one of her former students, Evelina Makaryan, a researcher at the Institute for Armenian Studies at YSU.
For three years the couple has to witness «the lapsing of human lights down there in the steep gorge» while they live their everyday life in their little house on the remote hillside.
Sakayan has deciphered and transcribed the documents written in Gothic handwriting; she has meticulously processed the data and embedded them in the historic events of the time.
Through a thoughtful interplay of primary and secondary texts, Sakayan tells a coherent story of endless human suffering, but also of Christian compassion and selflessness.
During the Summer semesters between 1981 and 1986, her contact and collaboration with the Translation Department of Saarbrücken University in Germany (Chairman: Dr. Wolfram Wilss) intensified her involvement and productivity in that field and resulted in several articles published in scholarly journals and books, as well as in several papers presented at international conferences.