In the English Language and TESOL (formerly TEFL) department at Swansea, we have a range of events and external speakers. Some of these events are external conferences hosted at Swansea, some are locally organised and some are organised in conjunction with the Language Research Centre.
Recent conferences
Advances in identifying formulaic sequences: a methodological workshop. FLaRN 2016 workshop
The Formulaic Language Research Network, FLaRN for short, which celebrated its 10th year in 2014, has attracted students and academics from across the globe to a practical workshop at Swansea University hosted by the College of Arts and Humanities, Swansea University’s Research Institute for Arts and Humanities (RIAH) and Swansea University’s Language Research Centre (LRC).
This year’s workshop was organised by Swansea University’s Dr. Maria Fernandez-Parra (Translation) and Dr. Vivienne Rogers (English Language).
“This workshop, as the FLaRN conference we organised in 2014, has turned out to be truly international,” said Dr. Fernandez-Parra. “We were delighted to welcome influential scholars from the UK but also from Sweden, Japan, Turkey and elsewhere.
“This has given both Swansea University students and all other attending PhD students a fantastic and unique opportunity to present their current work at international level, meet influential scholars and discuss their work in person with them.”
Dr. Rogers said organisers were pleased with the response. “We are truly delighted that the workshop has been a success” she said. “FLaRN was founded by Professor Alison Wray from Cardiff University in 2004 to coordinate research work in the field of formulaic language – this includes idioms, fixed expressions and other combinations of words which have similar behaviours in linguistic terms.”
“We would really like to thank all delegates for making this event such a success! The next event regarding Formulaic Language will be the FLaRN conference to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 28-30 June. In the meantime, delegates and anyone interested can continue the debate online through the web site www.flarn.org.uk.”
“New Approaches to Vocabulary Studies” BAAL Vocabulary SIG annual conference 2015
Post-conference report– Written by Yixin Wang and Michael Daller
The BAAL Vocabulary SIG annual conference was held on 2nd and 3rd of July, 2015 at Swansea University Singleton Park campus. It is the second time of Vocabulary SIG members’ reunion since the SIG was set up by Professor James Milton in 2010. It aimed to gather the most recent vocabulary studies and discussed the future vocabulary studies development.
The conference welcomed up to 30 early researchers and prestigious scholars from different universities within UK, and outside of UK, such as Spain, Saudi Arabia, Poland, China etc. The event provided a friendly and supportive space to share recent research on vocabulary studies. It attracted an unprecedented number of high quality paper and poster proposals.
The conference started with a pre-conference workshop, presented by Dr. Cris Izura, introducing eye-tracking vocabulary experiments programming and recording reaction times. Plenary speakers, Professor Tess Fitzpatrick from Cardiff University and Professor Jeanine Treffers-Daller from University of Reading, provided diverse perspectives on the discussions of vocabulary studies. At Q& A panel, the delegates were impressed by the intellectual energy and academic rigour on display.