ISFC40 Closes Today

Last updated:2013-07-20

The final day of ISFC40 began with a plenary speech by Professor Yang Xueyan entitled Modelling ‘interactivity’ of Teachers’ Questions. Professor Yang applied SFL to the problem: how to ask question effectively in classroom interaction. She attempted to develop a model to show how interpersonal choices in teachers’ questions work to elicit answers from students. The aim of her research is to offer a framework for analyzing teachers’ questions, and meanwhile to enhance the understanding of what makes ‘question’ a truly interactive event.


Professor Christian Matthiessen delivered a plenary speech entitled Registerial Cartography: Context and Semantics. He gave an interim report on a long-term project concerned with what he called registerial cartography. Professor Matthiessen proposed that the task in registerial cartography is to map out a region of semantic space in such a way that the features of this region reflect the diversification of context into institutions and, within these, situation types. He presented a context-based registerial map and showed how to use this map to explore the relationship between context and semantics.
The parallel session speakers today included prominent scholars such as James D.Benson and William S. Greaves, Zhang Delu, Miao Xingwei, Kazuhiro Teruya, etc. Topics of parallel sessions involved a wide range of research fields within SFL theory.


The closing ceremony of ISFC40 was chaired by Professor Wendy Bowcher. Professor Chang Chenguang, dean of School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, made a brief summing-up speech, and Professor Huang Guowen, chair of the executive committee of ISFLA gave a closing speech and expressed gratitude to all those who had helped to make this congress a success. Professor Geoff Thompson, the former chair of ISFLA, expressed thanks to the organizers of ISFC40. Finally, Professor Cecilia Colombi introduced the plans for ISFC41 to be held in Mendoza, Argentina in April next year.


Written by: Wen Suijuan 
Photographer: Wang Shaoli