Colombo Uni. English Language Teaching Unit hosts Intl.l Research Symposium on English as a Second L

Registration now open for proposal submission and participation

The rise of English as a global lingua franca has encouraged more innovative, reflective and rigorous research into the area of second-language studies in Sri Lanka. In order to provide a forum for such research and create a discourse around it, the English Language Teaching Unit of the University of Colombo will hold its second International Symposium on Language Studies in September this year. Planned under the theme ‘English as a Second Language: Knowledge, Learning and Production’, this year’s symposium will be held for two full days on 28 and 29 September, at the Arts Faculty of the Colombo University.  

Proposals for papers, poster presentations and workshops are now open, and must be submitted before 17 July for consideration. Proposals can be made under the themes of Language and Education, Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Innovation in Language Teaching, Translation Pedagogy and Language, Power and Ideology. Proposals must be submitted in soft copy and hard copy format and a blind review process will be followed. For more information on the preparation guidelines for proposals and registration, please check website http://arts.cmb.ac.lk/eltu/symposium2017 email [email protected] or call 112 506 705. All submissions will be acknowledged, and those accepted will be notified by 7 August. The final date of registration for presenters will be 20 September, while an early bird option is available for presenters and participants if they register before 21 August. On-site registration is also available for participants.

The keynote speaker at the event will be Prof. Diane Larsen-Freeman from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Prof. Larsen-Freeman is interested in the process of second language development. She researches English grammar, and regards it not only as a set of structural patterns, but also a resource for making meaning and adapting language to the communicative context. 

The plenary speakers will be Dr. Ramanujam Parthasarathy, Director of the English Language Teaching Centre and Senior Professor of English, Gudlavalleru Engineering College, Andhra Pradesh, India and Dr. Hemamala Ratwatte, Senior Lecturer, Language Studies Department, Open University of Sri Lanka. Dr Ramanujan’s fields of expertise include curriculum development, materials design, ELT research – especially classroom research – teacher education, and journalism. And Dr. Ratwatte’s current research is on the psycholinguistic underpinnings of learning and teaching a second language in Sri Lanka, cognition and bilingualism, and teacher education.