First, I would like to express my congratulations on the opening of the 4th International Symposium on Second language research in China on behalf of China English Language Education Association or CELEA in its short form.
Now I would like to share my three concerns about second language research with all of you here. The first is how to promote research on instructed SLA since in the foreign language context, hardly any learners develop their foreign language competence without formal instruction. I strongly suggest that our researchers should go to classrooms and work together with teachers to find out how learning in classroom is actually going on. Since last years some of the researchers in the National Research Center for Foreign Language Education where I am working have started such research projects. They go to observe classes regularly and discuss with teachers the critical issues concerning instructed SLA. I believe our research findings will be published soon.
The second is how to make our research findings comprehensible to classroom teachers. I have noticed that some researchers have misunderstanding about the quality of research papers. They think the best paper should have more jargons and less readable by the outsiders. I believe as researchers, we have social responsibilities of disseminating our research findings among the people concerned. We should try our best to make our research findings reach as many people as possible.
The third concern is how to make our research findings known to the outside world. We all know that China has the largest number of foreign language learners and probably the largest number of foreign language teachers in the world. However, our voice has hardly been heard. The reasons are various. One of them is that we do not work hard enough.
This conference is a venue for us to share and exchange our research experiences with our overseas participants. It is also a good opportunity for us to learn from other participants.
I wish all of you a pleasant stay at the conference!
苏州大学外语教学取得丰硕成果
苏州大学外国语学院院长 王腊宝
For more than a year, my colleagues and I here in this University have been looking forward to this conference, because we knew it would be a great opportunity to see old pals and make new friends. I realize people are coming to the conference for various reasons. For one thing, Second Language Acquisition and English Language Education in China remain fascinating to professionals like myself. On the other hand, people are coming because they feel a perpectual attraction from Prof. White, Prof. Schmidt, Prof. Wen, Prof. Wang and many other charismatic scholars who are here today.
For those who’re here for the first time, let me say just a few words to give you some idea of our history. For historical reasons, English teaching and learning had had its tradition here formed with us, well before Soochow University officially had its Department of English in 1940. Many decades later, the tradition is renewed while the English Department is expanded into something of a gigantic enormity, which offers now 7 programs in 7 different languages and it has an undergraduate population of over 1000. Meanwhile, over 300 students study here in our Masters and Ph. D programs. Students by the thousands have in the last three decades become high achievement alumni and many of them have opted for English Language teaching as a career. They together form a chain between them and in that chain you get a great picture of the fascination the English teaching holds for our students of different generations.
