NEWS & EVENTS
Martin Centre Wraps Up the Programme of Course Trainings and Symposia 2014
Yu Meixin, Chen Yingtao 2014-11-09
The third research students’ symposium finished on November 8th, marking the successful conclusion of all this year’s SFL training and symposia of Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics.
Martin Centre director, world-renowned systemic functional linguist Professor James R. Martin delivered this year’s training courses which focused on both basic theories and advanced academic frontier developments on systemic functional linguistics. The symposia were also themed on systemic functional linguistics, where trainees presented their papers in relevant fields. Over one hundred doctorate candidates of 11 universities from both home and abroad participated in these events.
The course training and symposia consisted of three phases. Every phase lasted for 6 days comprising a five-day training and a one-day symposium. The first phase was held from July 21st to 26th, mainly reviewing Halliday’s description on transitivity, mood, theme, nominal groups and verbal groups, and the afternoon sessions focused on the relationships between system and structure and their formalizations in the system network. The second phase lasted from September 29th to October 4th. The training of this period was mainly on discourse semantics, involving discourse semantics systems of evaluation, identification, conjunction, ideation and negotiation. The third phase ran from November 3rd to 8th, mainly on genre, register and multimodality. During the training, Professor James R. Martin combined training with practice, which consolidated the students’ theoretical foundation and improved their hands-on abilities. The trainees have benefited considerably from the training.
During the three symposia, 21 trainees presented their papers based on the training topics and their research interest and received comments from the panel. Nine papers have been recommended as outstanding and scheduled to be published on the Journal of Contemporary Foreign Language Studies.
At the closing ceremony, executive director of the Martin Centre Professor Wang Zhenhua commented that this event, featuring instructions from internationally prominent professor, has provided valuable chances for SFL doctorate students. At the end, Professor Wang iterated four Key Words in academic research, namely mission, vision, theory and application. Professor Wang also encouraged the trainees ‘to concentrate, to contemplate, to comprehend and to cherish’.
