Keynote Talks 专题演讲
Insights and Innovation from Languages for the Professions and Academic Purposes
Christine Uber Grosse
Professor Emeritus, Thunderbird, Arizona State University
This talk discusses recent insights and innovations that have emerged from the fields of languages for the professions and academic purposes around the world. Globalization has impacted higher education, and led to rising demand for proficiency in other languages, cultural understanding, and country knowledge. Global accrediting bodies for professional schools such as business, engineering, medicine, and law encourage member institutions to internationalize their curriculum through coursework, content, and international experiences. Universities also recognize the value of instruction in language for academic purposes to help students succeed in their degree programs.
The speaker also explores the innovations that languages for the professions bring to professional schools and modern language departments. These include an interdisciplinary approach, emphasis on cultural literacy, reliance on digital materials, increased use of AI and technology, as well as greater exposure to international experiences such as study travel, service learning, and internships.
In conclusion, faculty who teach languages for the professions and academic purposes are finding new inspiration in opportunities for professional development, research, travel, networking, and mentoring. For their contribution to internationalizing professional schools and the university, they deserve support and recognition from their higher education and government agencies.
Grosse Keynote Powerpoint presentation
Presentation references (Grosse) | |
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Why Should We Seriously Consider Teaching Chinese for Specific Purposes?
James Dean Brown
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
This speech will explore why we should seriously consider teaching Chinese for specific purposes (CSP). I will first address the significance of language for specific purposes (LSP) in the field of second/foreign language education by: reviewing the history of LSP in English and other Western languages; explaining how communicative language teaching and learning inevitably rely on needs analysis (one way of finding a purpose); and then discussing the expanding breadth of research and practice in LSP (i.e., it is NOT a narrow field that a field only serves limited audience). Second, I will reflect briefly on the status of Chinese as a “less commonly taught language” in the US and how long that may remain the case: including why we teach Chinese; why teaching Chinese for no obvious purpose (CNOP?) is pointless; and how teaching Chinese for literature purposes serves only a very narrow audience (of future Chinese majors and graduate students), but also discourages others who study Chinese for other purposes. After considering why people study Chinese (for global or more local purposes) and how daunting language learning actually is, I will clarify how teaching CSP can provide narrower, more practical, and realistically attainable goals.
Powerpoint Presentation (Brown) | |
File Size: | 405 kb |
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Language Arts and Chinese for Specific Purposes
Chu-Ren Huang
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Language Arts by definition is the study and improvement of the arts of language, especially in terms of the understanding of language in different genres and the effective use of language for different purposes, including persuasion and expression. Language arts and language for specific purposes are closely related by this definition. However, past studies on language for specific purposes, especially in the Chinese context, rarely touch upon language arts. In this talk, based on and extended from the chapter on linguistic devices for Chinese language arts in Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics (Huang et al. 2018), I will introduce a few aspects of Chinese language arts that are useful in the study and learning of Chinese for specific purposes. In particular, I will start with the regular polysemy and how such polysemy can be used as signature of language for specific purposes, e.g. the fact that the term ‘rose’ can refer to the flower with or without the stem, petals, the plant, or the extracted essential oil, among others. I will then introduce puns and euphemism involving different linguistic levels from character to code switching and their use in different specific domains. Lastly, I will introduce other linguistic devices that can also be involved in the language arts for specific purposes including but not limited to choices of function words, calque (translation-transliteration), suoxie abbreviation, haplology, and alphabetic words. It is hoped that by increasing awareness of linguistic devices for language arts, new perspectives and insights can be introduced to the study of Chinese for specific purposes.
chinese_for_specific_purpose_conference_crh.pptx | |
File Size: | 1477 kb |
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一带一路”建设需要商务汉语教学
Jianming Lu
Peking University
文章一开始就陈述了本文的立意依据,说明我们提出“‘一带一路’建设需要商务汉语教学”是有理据的。接着文章论述了商务汉语教学在“一带一路”建设中的作用,特别指出“一带一路”建设需要语言铺路搭桥,而“一带一路”建设是以经济建设为主导,因此商务汉语教学在语言铺路搭桥中将起排头兵的作用。文章重点是要论述如何确保商务汉语教学在“一带一路”建设中真正起到语言铺路搭桥的排头兵作用,而在回答这个问题时将提出若干具有建设性的意见与建议。
Academic Chinese Corpora: Construction and Applications
Hongyin Tao
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
The past several decades of research in Chinese applied linguistics have seen rapid developments in corpus infrastructure building and exploitation. However, one area in which systematic research is still lacking involves academic Chinese. In this talk, I describe the construction of written academic Chinese corpora at UCLA and partner institutions and report preliminary results of research based on these corpora as well as their pedagogical applications in developing teaching materials for advanced Chinese language learning. Theoretical and practical issues in academic Chinese and the role of corpora in academic language pedagogy are discussed.
tao_academic_chinese_uh_2018.pdf | |
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