| UOW Vice-Chancellor, Professor Gerard Sutton, today (2 July) official... UOW Vice-Chancellor, Professor Gerard Sutton, today (2 July) officially welcomed participants to the ALAA conference. He is pictured in the front row with conference co-convener Dr Honglin Chen and keynote speaker, Professor Jan Blammaert. In the back row (from left) are: Conference co-convener Dr Ken Cruikshank, keynote speaker Professor Rod Ellis, President of ALAA Professor Joe LoBianco and keynote speaker Professor Ingrid Piller. |
World’s leading applied linguists at Wollongong conference
2 Jul 2007 | Renee Criddle
Language testing for citizenship, multilingualism and language issues around migration and refugees are some of the hot topics at the 32nd Annual Congress of Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) being held at Wollongong from 1-3 July.
These issues are being discussed by about 200 applied linguists along with representatives from community groups and from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.
The theme of the conference, “Making a Difference” is intended to showcase the contribution of linguists working in such areas as language teaching and learning, policy development, discourse analysis, language assessment, language development and bilingualism.
Conference conveners, Dr Ken Cruickshank and Dr Honglin Chen, of UOW’s Faculty of Education, said the rapid worldwide increase in migration and reactions to it, the expansion of media and technology, political changes at international and local levels are both challenges and opportunities for research in applied linguistics.
Keynote speakers are:
- Professor Jill Bourne who is Professor of Primary Education at the University of Southampton;
- Professor Jan Blommaert who is Professor and Chair of Languages in Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and who is also part-time Professor of African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Ghent University, Belgium;
- Professor Rod Ellis from the Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics, University of Auckland;
- Professor Ingrid Piller an applied sociolinguist who is Executive Director of the Adult Migrant English Program Research Centre at Macquarie University.
The conference is being hosted by the Centre for Research in Language and Literacy (CRILL) in the Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong in conjunction with the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA) conference, with an overlap day on 1 July.
Organisers say this will be a chance to stimulate debate and explore further the theme of the ASFLA conference: Bridging Discourses, with opportunities in the parallel sessions and the closing forum for dialogue between various approaches to theory and practice in the applied linguistics field.
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