Author: Christopher

The last couple of months has been filled with activities in ALC,  here is a little information about just a few of them.

Applied Linguistics Seminar Series:

In December we welcomed Dr Mohammad Ahmadian from the University of Leeds. He presented his research as part of our seminar series, with his talk entitled L2 pragmatics instruction through video-based focused and unfocused tasks: do working memory capacity and language aptitude play a role? His fascinating talk was very well attended by staff and students of Newcastle and Northumbria Universities.

CA Day @ Loughborough University:

The annual Conversation Analysis day, organized by researchers at Loughborough University, was very well attended by ALC members. Fresh from finishing her PhD viva, Qi Chen presented her data and impressive findings to an audience of Conversation Analytic researchers from across the globe.

Research paper published:

ALC lecturer Dr Chris Leyland recently published a paper in Pragmatic (Quarterly) entitled Pre-enactment in team-teacher planning talk: demonstrating a possible future in the here-and-now. This paper looks at multilingual interaction in a Japanese context and considers how words, objects and the body are manipulated to create a vision of a forecasted classroom scene. It can be found here.

Presentation at the University of Edinburgh:

Chris Leyland presented at the Edinburgh TESOL and Applied Language (ETAL) Research Group’s Seminar Series. His talk was entitled The uses of objects in English team teacher lesson planning meetings.

 

 

 

As part of this series, held in the School of ECLS, we have so far had four talks.
They have all gone extremely well, with large audiences, insightful talks and very useful discussions! This has been a big success, and we have seven more talks to come! Here is a quick summary of the talks given so far:

• Our first speaker was Dr Melissa Yu.

Melissa is currently teaching Cross-Cultural Communication modules at the London-based campus of Newcastle University. Her talk was entitled Invitation to a ‘potluck’ lingua-cultural party in the classroom for the international understanding of English. This talk was very well attended by staff and students from Newcastle and Northumbria Universities. Keep up the good work in London Melissa!

• The second speaker was Dr Elaine Lopez.

Elaine has recently joined the Applied Linguistics and Communication team at Newcastle University. This was a great opportunity for her to show us what her research is all about. Her talk entitled Measuring lexical knowledge in L2 academic writing was very well attended, with local university staff and students as well as several language teachers from INTO. This was an excellent example of how applied linguistics research can easily inform the professional practices of language teachers.

• The third talk was given by current members of the ALC team, Drs Alina Schartner and Tony Young.

This talk entitled Towards a conceptual model of international student adjustment and adaptation tapped into a very topical issue. This fascinating talk was highly informative and sparked a very lively discussion amongst the presenters and audience. Despite the cold weather around 50 staff and students attended!

• The forth talk was given by our first ‘external’ speaker, Dr Bróna Murphy from the University of Edinburgh.

This talk was entitled British converts to Islam: constructing identity. This was probably the best attended talk of the year, with large numbers of MA Cross-Cultural Communication students, doctoral students and staff from various local universities! This corpus linguistics-based study of British female converts to Islam unearthed and discussed a ‘double frame’ facing these people as well as various familial and societal challenges. (The organizer couldn’t get a sufficiently clear picture of her talk due to low lighting and a poor flash, apologies!)

Thank you so much to the presenters and attendees for making the Seminar Series so successful so far. I am looking forward to the upcoming talks. The next will be given by Dr Mohammad Ahmadian from the University of Leeds. Details to follow soon…