Keynote Speakers

Professor Andy Kirkpatrick

Department of Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University

Brisbane, Australia

Bio

Andy Kirkpatrick is Professor in the Department of Languages and Linguistics at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. He has lived and worked in many countries in East and Southeast Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore. He is the author of English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN: a multilingual model (Hong Kong University Press). He is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of World Englishes. His most recent books are English as an Asian Language: implications for language education, co-edited with Roly Sussex and published by Springer, and Chinese Rhetoric and Writing, co-authored with Xu Zhichang and published by Parlor Press. He is founding and chief editor of the journal and book seriesMultilingual Education, published by Springer, and has recently been appointed editor-in-chief of the Asia Journal of TEFL. He is Director of the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) project.

Abstract

The increasing use of EMI in Asian Higher Education: planned policy or ad hoc implementation?

In recent years there has been a rapid increase in the number of English medium of instruction (EMI) programmes across institutions of higher education in non-Anglophone countries. This increase was first seen in Europe and can be attributed to the Bologna Declaration of 1999 by which the European Higher Education Area was established. This increase in the move to EMI courses can now been seen across many countries of Asia. In this presentation, I shall first give an overview of the spread of EMI courses and programmes in universities across East and Southeast Asia, with a focus on China and Hong Kong. I shall then consider the implications of this spread for the role of local languages as languages of scholarship and knowledge dissemination. I shall argue that the increasing use of EMI in writing across borders must be placed within a framework of multilingualism through which languages other than English must play a complementary role as languages of scholarship and knowledge dissemination. This will mean that universities need to draw up coherent language education policies in consultation with key stakeholders, including staff and students. In conclusion I shall consider and discuss language education policy in two specific settings – Malaysia and Myanmar – and argue that, despite the increasing adoption of EMI in HE throughout the region, few nations or institutions have coherent language education policies which provide guidelines as how best EMI might be implemented. This lack of coherent language education policies has serious implications for the implementation of EMI.

Professor John Flowerdew

Department of Engligh, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (Retired)

Visiting Professor, Department of English Language and Linguistics, Lancaster University, UK

Bio

Prof. John Flowerdew's research and teaching is in the field of Applied Linguistics, focusing on discourse studies (including critical discourse analysis and corpus-based approaches) and language education. He has authored or edited 12 books and special editions of journals, including Academic Listening: Research Perspectives (1994) Cambridge University Press; The Final Years of British Hong Kong: The Discourse of Colonial Withdrawal (1998) Macmillan; English for Academic Purposes: Research Perspectives (with M. Peacock) (2001) Cambridge University Press; Academic Discourse (2002) Longman; Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice (with L. Miller) (2005) Cambridge University Press; Advances in Discourse Studies (with V.K. Bhatia and R. Jones) (2008) Routledge; Lexical Cohesion and Corpus Linguistics. (with M. Mahlberg) (2009) John Benjamins; Critical Discourse Analysis in Historiography: The Case of Hong Kong's Evolving Political Identity (2011) Palgrave Macmillan and Discourse in English Language Education (2013) Routledge. His most recent book, edited with Tracey Costley, is Discipline-Specific Writing: Theory into Practice (Routledge). In addition, he has published over 100 book chapters and internationally refereed journal articles. He serves on the editorial boards of a range of international journals and book series and is regularly invited to give plenary talks at conferences internationally.

Abstract

Using the data-driven approach to facilitate the research writing of post-graduate students

Universities around the world now face the growing challenges of remaining competitive in the international research arena. As a result, many doctoral (and even some Masters) students worldwide are now under pressure to publish internationally (e.g. Li, 2002). As users of English as an additional language, novice researchers in places like Hong Kong often face linguistic difficulties or other disadvantages in getting their research published (Belcher, 2007; Curry, & Lillis, 2004; Flowerdew, 1999, 2000, 2001).  However, support for research writing in Hong Kong, mainland China and elsewhere is still inadequate (Li & Flowerdew, 2009; Kwan, 2010). In this talk, I will focus on using a corpus-based approach to facilitate the research writing of post-graduate students.

I will begin by briefly reviewing some of the literature on corpus-based approaches to language teaching and learning, with a particular emphasis on what is referred to as the data-driven learning approach (Johns, 1994).  I will then describe a project I have been leading during which half-day workshops have been delivered to over 500 PhD students from a great variety of disciplines across six Hong Kong UGC-funded universities in order to help them improve research writing by using corpora. Hands-on activities and discussion in these workshops were designed to show the participants how they could solve lexical, grammatical, and discourse level problems with their writing using online free corpora such as the British National Corpus and off-line software (AntConc) with the discipline-specific corpora built by one of the project team members.  I will show how students were guided step-by-step to start creating a corpus of their own using high-quality research articles in their own research domains.  I will conclude by arguing that intensive introductory workshops can be an effective way of teaching post-graduate students to learn to write for publication purposes independently using the data-driven learning approach.