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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Internship Opportunities with HANA Microelectronics
Presented by Mr. Winson Hui, President and COO of HANA
Topics Covered in the Presentation:
- HANA Corporate Profile br />
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HANA's Vision and Culture
- Cooperative Education Program Inclusive of Internship Activities
- Employee Activities and the Working Environment
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
SMIC, doing business holistically
Presented by by Dr Richard Chang, President and CEO of SMIC
