In the English Language and TESOL section 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
LTF 2019
The LTF 2019 was hosted by the Department of Applied Linguistics and English Language Training Services (ELTS) from 22nd to the 24th of November 2019. Connecting research, policy and practice in language assessment with Dr Emyr Davies opening the conference with their paper on: Golwg ar Asesu’r Gymraeg / Perspectives on the Assessment of Welsh.
Dawn Knight, Steve Morris and Lucy Davis gave a pre-conference workshop catering to corpus linguistics for researchers and practitioners where participants were given the opportunity to investigate English language and Welsh language corpora. Some of our research students and staff also presented posters at the conference.
- Investigating the validity of a productive vocabulary test: the G_Lex by Anisur Rahman and Prof. Tess Fitzpatrick
- Non-corpus approaches to creating wordlists for assessment and teaching / Ymagweddau at greu rhestri geiriau, heb gorpws, ar gyfer asesu ac addysgu by Prof Tess Fitzpatrick, Prof Paul Meara and Steve Morris.
- What are EAP raters looking for in a written task? by Lucy Davies from ELTS (this won the best poster presentation)
- Does using automated written corrective feedback affect the validity of writing coursework assignments? by Lara Duke from ELTs
- Validation of a computerised picture-based receptive vocabulary test by Chloe Mills
For a list of the full programme and poster presentations, these can be found on the UKALTA (UK Association for Language testing and assessment) site.
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.
