Day 3 of ISFC40

Last updated:2013-07-18

Today’s program of ISFC40 comprised two plenary speeches, 39 parallel presentations as well as colloquia and workshops
The morning sessions began with a plenary speech from Professor Cecilia Colombi entitled Multilingual California: Spanish in the Media. Based on the theoretical framework of SFL, the analytical tools of evaluation and multimodality, Professor Colombi analyzed the use of Spanish in the public sphere, especially in advertising. By comparing and contrasting those which are targeted specifically at Latinos and those which are designed for the English speaking population, she tried to show how these signs and ads aim at attracting and aligning with different communities that speak Spanish or English.

                                                       Professor Cecilia Colombi                                          Professor Wendy L. Bowcher

After the parallel presentations in the morning, Professor Wendy L. Bowcher delivered a plenary speech entitled Context of Situation: Problems, Paths, and Utility. She introduced the background of context of situation and observed the various issues that arise and which point to the advantages but also the difficulties of putting together a representative set of system networks for context of situation. According to Professor Bowcher, the issues include the concept of ‘semiotic’, the interdependency of the contextual parameters, default dependency relations, representative primary system entry points, sub-system features and environments for more delicate options, the relationship between the material and the semiotic in a situation of language use, multimodality, and the role of ‘iteration’. Professor Bowcher also discussed and illustrated some of these issues and proposed some possible ways of dealing with them through examining a variety of texts/contexts and working through some of the subsystems in the currently available contextualization system networks.

The papers presented in the afternoon involved a range of topic areas: multimodality, e-discourse, education, code-switching, genre-based pedagogy, context and register and corpus tools. The workshop on Using Corpus Tools to explore intonation in terms of the Eggins and Slade MOVE network was taught by Professor William Greaves and Meena Debashish. There were two colloquia “Classroom Discourse Studies: SFL in Conversation with Dialogic Teaching” (chaired by Pauline Jones & Jenny Hammond) and “Broadening the Path of Language Education: Complementarities between First and Second Language Contexts” (chaired by Marvin Lam). The afternoon parallel sessions were followed by the Annual General Meeting of ISFLA.

The China Association of Functional Linguistics also held a question and answer session on Developments of Systemic Functional Linguistics in Lecture Hall 101 in the evening.

 

Written by: Qiu Qing
Photographer: Wang Shaoli & Peng Dongmin