20 May 2009
Power and Professional Identity in the Workplace:
Model, Methods and Interpretations
Presented by Professor Janet Holmes

Interacting on a daily basis with colleagues and superiors in the workplace poses interesting and subtle discursive challenges for individuals, especially those in leadership positions. Through their talk, leaders need to simultaneously construct themselves as responsible professionals oriented to the transactional goals of the organisation and as caring colleagues, concerned with developing and maintaining supportive and positive workplace relationships.

This talk illustrates how the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) Project tracked such discursive accomplishments by female and male leaders in a range of different New Zealand organisations, including some with distinctive ethnic orientations. The distinctive and innovative approach and methodology of the LWP Project will be discussed and illustrated.

24 November 2008
"The death of English: LOL"?: the case of electronic communication in Southeast Asian Englishes
Presented by Dr. Vincent Ooi

This seminar aims to survey the plurality of computer-mediated communication with respect to three Southeast Asian varieties of English, and touch on what this type of linguistic evidence means for the practice of corpus and Hallidayan linguistics.

Computer-mediated communication – a rubric term for “Netlingo”, “Textese”, “Netspeak”, and “Weblish” – is increasingly under scrutiny by educators and linguists alike. This view is complicated by the fact that there is not just one ‘universal’ type of electronic communication in English. In Southeast Asia alone, there is a whole range of computer-mediated discourses in Singaporean, Malaysian, and Filipino Englishes – notably in instant messaging, text messaging, online chatrooms and personal blogs.

As the younger generation increasingly goes online 24/7, such types of linguistic evidence have to be factored into linguistic theory, corpus building, dictionary-making, software compilation, and educational discourse.

3 -5 November 2008 (Monday to Wednesday)
Workshops on Genre-based Literacy Teaching: the Sydney School (Part III)
Presented by Professor James Martin and Dr. Susan Hood


[Monday]
Workshop 1: Classroom interaction and metalanguage in relation to Rose's recent development of genre-based literacy programs (Reading to Learn/Learning to Read)

For this workshop I will introduce a model for analysing classroom interaction focussing on moves in exchanges and exchange complexes.? This analysis will then be applied to David Rose's innovative Reading to Learn/Learning to Read pedagogy, in order to interpret the ways in which he has adapted Sydney School initiatives to include a reading focus alongside writing.? In particular we will be concerned with his design of both micro-and macro- interactions between the teacher and students, and the way his use of metalanguage brings text to consciousness in a way that develops all students as more proficient readers and writers, across sectors.

[Tuesday]
Workshop 2:? Writing introductions to research papers in English: Managing the dual demands for critique and ‘objectivity’

Part 1: What do writers evaluate and how?
In the first half of this seminar I explore the ways in which published academic writers legitimise their research in the introductions to their research articles (RAs). The data I will draw on are from published RAs in the fields of education and applied linguistics. My theoretical tool is Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, most particularly theories of meaning making at the level of discourse semantics, with specific reference to with reference to Appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005). The analyses reveal a differentiation of two key fields in the discourse, one to do with the actual object of study, the other to do with the processes of knowledge building around this object of study. Typically each field is evaluated using different evaluative strategies.

Part 2: Ways of creating space for new knowledge: The role of Graduation
In the second part of the seminar I focus in on one key resource for evaluating that was encountered in Part 1, namely that of Graduation (Hood & Martin 2007) to consider how and why Graduation functions as a key resource in evaluation in academic writing. The analyses reveal that by grading experiential meanings writers are able to imply a stance while avoiding potentially divisive dichotomised positive or negative evaluations, and by blurring categorical boundaries they are able to create space for new knowledge.

Finally we can return to the title and reflect on how it is that academic writers in English manage the apparently contradictory expectations that they be both persuasive and ‘objective’ in creating a space for new knowledge. And most importantly consider the context of pedagogy, and how we can make the demands of academic writing more transparent to novice writers of academic English.

References:

[Wednesday]
Workshop 3

Part 1: Summary writing in academic contexts: Implicating meaning in processes of change

Being able to summarise source texts is an important component in writing multi-voiced texts as essays, literature reviews, research proposals and reports. Typically students are expected to demonstrate an understanding of the key meanings encoded in source texts by recording those meanings in note form, and then reconstructing them as a shorter summary text relying minimally on the original wording. What may appear a relatively straightforward process is made considerably more complex when we consider that any change in wording necessarily impacts on meaning in some way. So what is involved in the task of satisfactorily re-presenting meanings from one source as new wordings in a second text? To explore this question I draw on Systemic Linguistic theory to analyse one pedagogic model of summary writing. My aims are two-fold: to explore how meaning is implicated in changing wordings; and to consider at a theoretical level what is involved in these changes. It is hoped in this way to develop a framework that can help academic language educators to better understand and articulate what summarising, reviewing, and re-drafting involve in terms of changing meanings, and to better scaffold this process for students and novice writers in academic English.

Part 2: The embodied practice of teaching: Analysing gesture in teacher talk

This paper draws on a study of gesture in teacher talk in face-to-face classrooms. The study proceeds from a social semiotic perspective that approaches gesture as a meaning potential. The study questions how meanings are realised in bodily movements and how those bodily movements relate to speech and interact with other visual semiotics. The analyses explore the potential for metafunctional meanings to be realised in gestures, resulting in the construction of tentative and partial system networks of meaning choices. Gestures and speech can be seen to cooperate as co-expressive and as complementary ways of meaning. The study contributes to a growing body of work in social semiotics that enables us to better understand practice as multimodal meaning making.

4 November 2008
Authorial Voice, Interpersonal Stance and Appraisal in Student Writing
Presented by Dr. Peter White

This seminar will explore the application of the appraisal framework to investigationsof how students develop the authorial voices and interpersonal stances which areconventionally associated with school and university text types/genres.  The seminar will focus on both school and university-level texts and on the writing of both native and non-native speakers. Discussion will be provided of how the appraisal framework can be applied to describing the different stances constructed by student writers (what Martin & White 2005 term evaluative "keys") and for exploring the potential communicative effects associated with these stances/keys. The use of the framework for tracking the development of students writers longitudinally will also be explored.

1-4 September 2008
Intensive Workshop: Intonation in English
Presented by Professor William S. Greaves

Organized by Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and supported by HCLS, CityU

Please visit the official workshop website for more information.

11 - 15 August 2008
The Second HCLS Conference (HCLS-C2)
Translation, Language Contact, and Multilingual Communication

Please visit the official conference website for more information.

1 August 2008
Introduction to Translation Technology
Presented by Professor Alan K. Melby

The intended audience of this presentation is those who are not yet using any translation-specific technology such as a translation memory system. The only assumptions made on the part of the attendees is that they have some experience in translation as a student or as a professional, that they know how to use a word processor and a Web browser, and that they use e-mail. The presenter will describe the eight types of translation technology that are used by the American Translators Association to categorize translation technology. Word processors, Web browsers, and e-mail clients are all part of the first type: infrastructure. The other seven types will be explained, and cases will be identified when translation technology can improve speed, accuracy, or consistency in translation. A demo will be given of a Web 2.0 approach to developing terminology resources.

26 & 27 March 2008 (Wednesday & Thursday)
Workshops on Genre-based Literacy Teaching: the Sydney School (Part II)
Presented by Professor James R. Martin

In this series of workshops Professor Martin presents a basic introduction to the genre-based literacy initiatives of the Sydney School. The basic aim of the workshops is to lay down some theoretical and applied foundations which can be recontextualised in relation to the e-literacy programs being developed at City U.

Professor Martin began in the first series of lectures with genre, the pedagogy developed to teach students genres, grammatical metaphor and knowledge structure.  In this second series of lectures he will focus first on genre systems and how they can be used to design curriculum (Day 1), and appraisal theory as a resource for analysing evaluation in discourse (Day 2).

1 February 2008
Worlds of Genre - Metaphors of Genre
Presented by Professor John M. Swales

The presentation opens with a discussion suggesting that a consensus has been growing among genre theorists and scholars since Hyon's 1996 article outlined "three traditions". Professor Swales then raises the issue of defining genre itself and goes on to propose that a metaphorical approach is a viable alternative. Two extensive illustrations follow. The first deals with the US PhD dissertation defense, drawing on Grimshaw (1989) and three transcripts from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Is this "a meaningless ritual" or a true test? The second explores the art history monograph. Among other facets, Professor Swales suggests, despite appearances to the contrary, that a book-length study describing an artist's life and work is no longer the "top genre" in the fine art field.

5-7 December 2007
The First HCLS Conference (HCLS-C1)
Becoming a World Language: the growth of Chinese, English and Spanish

Please visit the official conference website for more information.

5-8 November 2007
Genre-based Literacy Teaching: the Sydney School
Presented by Professor James R. Martin

In this series of workshops Professor Martin will present a basic introduction to the genre-based literacy initiatives of the Sydney School. He will begin in the first workshop with genre, illustrating this concept and situating it with a general model of language and relevant modalities of communication (systemic functional linguistics and semiotics). In workshop 2 he will turn the pedagogy developed to teach students genres, including discussion of thinking by Halliday, Painter, Bernstein and Vygotsky which influenced our teaching and learning strategies. Then in workshop 3 he will focus on grammatical metaphor, mainly from an ideational perspective, because of the crucial role it plays in academic discourse. Finally in workshop 4 he will open up the question of disciplinarity and knowledge structure, in relation to both grammatical metaphor and genre and some of Bernstein's late thinking on horizontal and vertical discourse.

The basic aim of the workshops is to lay down some theoretical and applied foundations which can be recontextualised in relation to the e-literacy programmes being developed at City U.

This series of workshops has been planned a part of a series which in its second phase would move on to consideration of genre systems, periodicity and appraisal in relation to curriculum development, and in a third phase would focus on classroom interaction, deixis and metalanguage in relation to Rose's recent development of genre-based literacy programs which pay close attention to reading.

12 October 2007
Text Analysis in Translator Training and Translation Studies
Presented by Professor Christian Matthiessen

The central focus of translation is text in context, covering all the phases from the source text in its context to the translated text in its context. Translators reconstrue the meanings of the source text in the target language, and their "competence" as translators depends o the nature of their personalized meaning potentials in the source and target languages, ability to map between them, and ability to operate as translators within the source and target contexts and within the meta-context of translation. Training translators in text analysis is analogous to teaching surgeons-in-training about human anatomy; it is a way of empowering them as translators, expanding the range of meanings that they are aware of as they translate and helping them make informed choices in the process of reconstruing the meanings of the sources text in the target language. Text analysis is also a powerful tool in translation studies, giving us new insights into shifts in meaning in the course of translation.

In this talk, Professor Matthiessen will discuss his experience in Linguistics, Macquarie University, with text analysis for translation from the perspective of translator training -- the development of a course dealing with text analysis for translation (involving translation between English and Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Spanish or French), and from the perspective of research into translation issues carried out within CTIR (the Centre for Translation and Interpreting Research) in his department. The course is convened jointly by Wu Canzhong and himself, and involves a team of colleagues at Macquarie University (Maria Herke, Ernest Akerejola, Jing Fang, Susan Hoadley, Mira Kim, and Ayako Ochi) and Korea University (Kyung-hee Park), where the course is offered as part of a Macquarie off-shore programme in translation and interpreting.

The approach they take draws on insights into translation coming from systemic functional linguistics (SFL), going back to early research in the 1950s; and it is part of an international network of research and teaching activities around the world, including sites in East Asia, South America, Europe and Australia.

11 October 2007
Human Language Technology and Functional Linguistics:
Opportunities and Challenges
Presented by Professor Elke Teich

Computation has become ubiquitous in all kinds of scientific endeavour. While in some disciplines computers remain mere tools for carrying out particular domain-specific tasks, in others computing becomes a veritable motor for scientific evolution. This development is also mirrored in linguistics, its computational involvement ranging from simple techniques of data processing (e.g., concordances) over building up linguistic resources (e.g., lexicons, thesauri, grammars) to the development of full-fledged information processing systems.

In this talk Professor Teich will discuss the opportunities and challenges for Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) of integrating linguistic computing in its research methodology. Also, she will reflect upon what SFL has to offer for natural language processing.

07 August 2007
News in War and Peace: a Diachronic, Systemic-functional Approach
Presented by Ms. Claire Scott

Since the inception of weekly newssheets in Europe in the late 16th century, the social context of news dissemination and, consequently, the visual and verbal character of newspaper texts, have undergone many changes. This paper, as part of a larger study of the way war has been reported in the news over Australia??s history of involvement in overseas conflict, explores changes in visual and verbal meanings of the news story in Australia. The corpus comprises news texts from the Sydney Morning Herald reporting the end of war, from the Boer War, World Wars I and II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, and Iraq War. Changes in the contextual configuration of each text, particularly in the parameters of Mode and Field, will be discussed in relation to historical and institutional context.

21 May 2007
Multiple Identities, Contested Roles: Strategic Interdiscursivity in Professional Communication in Times of Change
Presented by Professor Christopher N Candlin

The title and the abstract provide a theme for two interlinked lectures. In the first Professor Candlin will focus principally on matters of theory and method, and in the second he will identify a number of crucial sites, and critical moments in such sites, which will serve both to locate the issues of the first lecture, and explain and challenge them.

Professional communication involves the strategic deployment of expert discursive resources in order to achieve personal, professional, institution-specific and social policy goals. Analysis of interactional data from such communication to date has largely focused on the micro analysis of excerpts of talk, and/or on the generic structure of the encounter-types in question. To a much lesser degree, such analysis has focused also on professional action, taking account of relevant institutional and organizational contexts in relation to the occupational practices of a specific site and/or to larger issues of public administration and policy.

In the first Lecture Professor Candlin provides a critical account of this landscape from the perspective of theory and method in discourse analysis, taking as a theme the need for analyses of professional communication both to connect text with action and to reflect policy-related shifts and changes in the nature and status of professional work. He will be arguing specifically for the focus of analysis to concentrate now on the communicative demands imposed by the pervasive need for professionals to adpot multiple identities and roles in their professional work, in particular identifying the requirement for competent professionals to deploy a range of strategic discursive resources in response to the exigencies of particular critical moments in the crucial sites in question, constrained by the macro influences of the institution within a changing social order.

In the second Lecture he argues that this re-orientation towards strategic resourcefulness in professional communication is essential, and for three reasons: one, that it reflects the need to make more explicit the link between communication and profession-specific expertise; two, that it permits valuable inter- and intra-professional comparisons across different encounter-types in relation to key themes; three, that it underpins two important research methodological principles: the joint problematisation of distinct participant perspectives and the applicability of research findings to issues of practical concern, in particular in relation to preferred modes of delivering professional development. A key focus of such a re-orientation will be the need to describe, interpret and explain the often competing interdiscursivities contingent upon such multiple and shifting identities and roles, particularly in relation to critical themes such as those of 'professional neutralism'; 'professional judgment', 'modes of argumentation', 'conjoint expertise', 'appeals to authority', 'uncertainty and risk', 'error and blame'. Data for both Lectures will be drawn from healthcare, legal and social work encounters with which Professor Candlin has been - sometimes jointly - engaged.

1 February 2007
Occasional Seminar Series
Using the Functional Grammar to Trace Developmental Growth in Control of Literacy from the Primary to Secondary Years
Presented by Professor Frances Christie

A great deal of research has been done over the years into children's writing development, reflecting for example, on the processes by which the very young take their first steps in mastering literacy, or on the kinds of literate texts they must mater in the secondary school. But few studies have provided systematic evidence about the developmental changes that occur over time in learning to manipulate the written mode. One important study was that of Perera (1984) whose study of children's writing and reading reviewed what was then known of the developmental processes by which children mastered the grammar of writing. However, Perera's study examined children's writing up to the age of 12, and she did not examine the years of the secondary year. In this seminar Professor Frances Christie reported on a study in which she has been involved tracing developmental changes from the primary to secondary years. Using the functional grammar, she focused on children's stories, tracing developmental changes from early childhood to adolescence, drawing in part on a recent study in which she has been involved with Beverly Derewianka.

30 January 2007
Internship Opportunities with HANA Microelectronics
Presented by Mr. Winson Hui, President and COO of HANA

Topics Covered in the Presentation:
     - HANA Corporate Profile br />      - HANA's Vision and Culture
     - Cooperative Education Program Inclusive of Internship Activities
     - Employee Activities and the Working Environment

22-25 January 2007
Korea Week 07, Seminar Series on Korean Studies

Korea Week 07 was organized by Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, and The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Application of Language Studies, and co-organized by Consulate General of the Republic of Korea.

22 January 2007 Professor Kiyong Lee
     Some Characteristics of the Korean Language and its Writing System, Hangeul
23 January 2007 Professor Sangoak Lee
     Preferred Colors in Various Cultures based on Lexical Frequency:
     Comparison among Korean, English, French, Russian, Romanian,
     Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian
24 January 2007 Professor Seokhoon You
     Systemic Functional Grammar in the Context of Task-based
     Language Teaching
25 January 2007 Ms. Jungja Ha
     Learning the Korean Sounds through the Fidel Color Chart - the Silent Way

13 January 2007
SMIC, doing business holistically
Presented by by Dr Richard Chang, President and CEO of SMIC
   

13 December 2006
Developing L2 Ability: A Longitudinal, Literacy-oriented View
Presented by Professor Heidi Byrnes

  
Most studies of L2 learners' evolving writing ability have been based on performances obtained from isolated and instructionally decontextualized composing tasks whch, furthermore, relied on cross-sectional data. By contrast this presentation draws on a multi-year longitudinal and cross-sectional investigation of L2 syntactic complexity, based on writing data collected acress the four years of the intgerated undergraduate program within the German Department at Georgetown University. The data comprise a corpus of over 250,000 words involving over 300 participants.

In this presentation Professor Heidi Byrnes (1) contextualized the research according to the learners, curriculum, and instructional approaches within an explicitly literacy-oriented program, wherein writing development toward advanced levels of ability was driven by the use of genre-based writing tasks; (2) outlined and justified the research methodology employed for investigating syntactic complexity within L2 writing development, from cross-sectional, longitudinal, and task-based perspectives; and (3) analyzed and interpreted data in terms of curricular predictions, instructional practices, and program-external research findings, with a focus on advanced levels.

5 December 2006
The Gloosy Ganoderm: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation
Presented by Professor M.A.K. Halliday
click to listen to the seminar

Translation is a process of bringing two (or more) languages into relation one with another. When we judge the product that emerges from this process, we face the familiar problem of assigning value to the various different ways in which languages may be related (often referred to as different aspects of "equivalence"). In a systemic functional theory of translation these are defined by the fundamental vectors of the theory: stratum, rank, axis (paradigmatic / syntagmatic) and metafunction; as well as by the patterns of functional, or "diatypic", variation within a language. These may be illustrated from translation between Chinese and English, as seen in the text example of the gloosy ganoderm.

13 November 2006
Endangered Languages: Causalities in the Era of Globalization
Presented by Dr. Matthias Gerner

An endangered language is a language with so few remaining speakers that it is in danger of falling out o use. If the last speaker has died, it becomes a dead or extinct language. The dramatic rise of the number of endangered languages nowadays is a byproduct of the phenomenon of globalization whereby pressure is put on small communities through global trade and the print and television media. Some linguists argue that at least 3,000 of the world's ca. 6,800 languages will be lost during this century. In this seminar, Dr. Matthias Gerner gave a comprehensive survey of all the issues relating to endangered languages.

26 September 2006
Web-based Strategies for Integrating English Learning in the Education of Professionals
Presented by Professor David Wible

In a recent talk at City University Professor Wible introduced a web-based language learning platform and discussed its integration with classroom contexts. As a follow-up, in this talk he laid out more specific strategies that could be implemented in the learning context of City University. He will sketch a variety of scenarios for integrating the learning of English with the domain curriculum of students in other fields (the natural sciences, business, engineering fields, and so on). The goal is to exploit the Web and to partner with English educators to create a seamless educational experience where students' English proficiency grows along with their expertise in their professional field of study. The key to these Web strategies is to do this without burdening domain educators with responsibility for students' English progress.

11 September 2006
An Empirical Account of Abverbial Clauses and their Variation across Speech and Writing
Presented by Dr Alex Chengyu Fang

This talk presented and investigation of adverbial clauses in contemporary British English, embodied in the International Corpus of English. It demonstrates on the basis of empirical evidence that it is simply a misconceived notion that adverbial clauses are typically associated with informal, unplanned types of discourse and hence spoken English. The investigation initially examined samples from both spoken and written English, followed by a contrastive analysis of spontaneous and prepared speech, to be finally confirmed by a further experiment based on timed and untimed university essays. These experiments consistently produced empirical evidence which irrefutably suggests that the written genre makes far more extensive uses of adverbial clauses than speech and that adverbial clauses are a significant characteristic of planned, elaborated discourse.

14 August 2006
Multilayered Extended Semantic Networks asa Knowledge Representation Paradigm and Interlingua for Meaning Representation
Presented by Professor Hermann Helbig

The talk gave an overview of Multilayered Extended Semantic Networks (abbreviated MultiNet), which is one of the most comprehensively described knowledge representation paradigms used as a semantic interlingua in large-scale Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications and for linguistic investigations into the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. As with other semantic networks, concepts are represented in MultiNet by nodes, and relations between concepts are represented as arcs. Every node is classified according to a predefined conceptual ontology forming a hierarchy of sorts, and the nodes are embedded in a multidimensional space of layer attributes and their values. MultiNet provides a set of about 150 standardized relations and functions which are described in a very concise way including an axiomatic apparatus, where the axioms are classified according to predefined types. The representational means of MultiNet claim to fulfill the criteria of universality, homogeneity, and cognitive adequacy. This talk will show how MultiNet can be used for the semantic representation of different semantic phenomena. MultiNet is associated with a set of tools including a semantic interpreter NatLink for automatically translating natural language expressions into MultiNet networks, a workbench LIA (Lexicon in Action) for the computer lexicographer, and a workbench MWR (Multinet Wissens Reprasentation, i.e. "MultiNet knowledge representation") for the knowledge engineer for managing and graphically manipulating semantic networks.

1 August 2006
Toward Digital Language Learning that Makes Sense:
Bridging Tools, Contexts, and People
Presented by Professor David Wible

Recently, there has been a growing awareness that digital tools in themselves do not solve educational problems directly. Tools must be embedded within learning contexts. Until recently, however, concern for these contexts has taken a back seat to efforts to create novel technologies. In this presentation, Professor David Wible described some of the tools and functions in the Intelligent Web-based Interactive Language Learning (IWiLL) platform that they have created over the past several years and illustrate how their attention has come to focus on the crucial role of learning contexts in the success of such technologies.

20 June 2006
Occasional Seminar Series
Disciplined Imagination: Thought Experiments
in Physics and Poetry, 1890 - 1950
Presented by Dr. David G. Butt

Thought experiments provide scientists with a critical symbolic tool, one that enables them to transcend finite facts, or the current limitations of action and observation, in their building of models of the natural world. This seminar aimed to detail the similarities between the use of this symbolic tool in physics and specific modes of heuristic proposal which appeared in an extreme form in poetry in English in the same 'modernist' period.

Professor Hasan's series of four seminars concerned certain aspects of linguistic meaning and explores in some detail one mode of its description. Based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory, this mode presents a practical tool for the analysis of meaning in language, both as system and as instance. On the assumption that the application of language studies can be intelligent only if it is based on an understanding of how language functions in all aspects of human life, the concerns of this seminar series are relevant to the Centre's Intelligent Applications of Language Studies.

12 April: On Linguistic Meaning
19 April: The Description and Representation of Meaning: Semantic Networks
26 April: How to Get Someone to Do Things by Using Language:
                   A Fragment of Message Semantics
3 May:   What is there in a Word: A Fragment of Component Semantics
Note: right click to save the audio files

26 to 29 March 2006
Symposium on "Meaning in Context: Implementing Intelligent Applications of anguage Studies"
To mark the official launch of The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies (HCLS)

click to listen to the Inaugural Lecture by Professor Halliday
Please visit http://hallidaycentre.cityu.edu.hk/events/symp2006/ for more information.

February and March 2006
Linguistics as Applied Science: A Series of Four Seminars
Presented by Professor M.A.K. Halliday

Professor Halliday's series of four seminars was concerned with "intelligent applications of language studies", as embodied in the title of the Centre. The talks moved between discussion of linguistic theory and illustration from language data and language-related issues and problems.

22 February: The Meanings of "Meaning"
1 March: Grammar as an Evolving System
8 March: Language and Languages:
                   The Multilingual Environment
15 March: The Space-time Organization of Language
 

14 and 15 November 2005
Lecture on Literatures in Englishes: Creation and Criticism, and
Poetry Reading
Presented by Professor Edwin Thumboo 

In the Lecture on 14 November, Professer Edwin Thumboo addressed (1) the challenges faced by writers belonging to nations where English, the ex-colonial language, is now a family of world englishes and (2) the critical approaches that best enable the studt of such literatures. On 15 November, there was a poetry reading in which he read several of his poems, including "Conjunction" and one he recently wrote entitled "Uncle Never Knew".

The event was organized by Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, Department of English and Communication, The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Application of Language Studies, and Run Run Shaw Library.