On December 8th 2015, at the invitation of the College of Foreign Studies, the famous linguist Professor Sheena Gardner visited our college, and presented an academic lecture entitled "Lexico-grammar across disciplines and levels of study in successful student writing”. The lecture was hosted by Cao Xinyu, vice-dean of the College of Foreign Studies, and some teachers and students attended to the lecture.
Firstly, Professor Gardner started the lecture by a little story and a related dialogue, and guided attendees to discuss grammatical features with each other. There was a lot of interaction during the lecture. She also introduced the methodology of academic writing, and shared the BAWE Corpus of Successful Student Writing, Frequent and Key Item searches and her book “Multi-dimensional Analysis of Variance” with attendees. Then she took eight phrases from different disciplines as examples, to guide teachers and students to find out vocabulary and grammar characteristics and differences among those different types of academic writing. Finally, Professor Gardner noted that research on vocabulary and grammatical features in outstanding academic writings will be of great significance for teaching, learning and translation of academic English.
Professor Gardner’s gentle but humorous style, rich yet profound content won warm applause from the attendees. Her lecture illuminated our future academic writing and teaching. Professor Gardner was hired by the 2014 school foreign experts’ recruitment project entitled “Foreign Languages and Literature: building an innovative talent recruitment base”. The visit aims to obtain progress in teaching and research cooperation.
Attachment: Professor Sheena Gardner and his research team started constructing the British Academic English Writing Corpus since 2004, which has lasted more than ten years and produced fruitful results. The research team has been funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and has published papers in the Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of the English for Academic Purposes, among others. The team has achieved fruitful results in the study of English as a Second Language learning strategies. The establishment of the British Academic English Writing Corpus is of great theoretical significance and applied value and it is an important reference for our college to develop linguistic teaching and research.
