Source: School of Foreign Languages
Written by: School of Foreign Languages
Translated by: CHEN Zhiyong
Proofread by: Dr. ZHAO Jing

The 18th Annual Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE), jointly sponsored by the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong and the School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, concluded successfully on December 9th. For the first time, the 4-day annual conference took place in two locations, Hong Kong and Guangzhou. The City University of Hong Kong hosted it from 6th to 7th and the Sun Yat-sen University hosted it from 8th to 9th, , which marked IAWE’s first coming to mainland China. The theme of this year’s annual conference was “World Englishes: Contexts, Challenges and Opportunities.” Professor CHANG Chenguang, Dean of the School of Foreign Languages, made the welcome remarks, and Professor DAI Fan delivered a keynote speech on “English language creative writing in the Chinese context: challenges and opportunities”, thus beginning the two-day session at Sun Yat-sen University.
During the two-day conference, Professor Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Professor Edgar Schneider from Universität Regensburg and Professor QU Weiguo from Fudan University gave keynote speeches on “Describing Indian English: the case of modality”, "World Englishes and education: the German-to-global perspective”, "World English or World Englishes: is there any difference between the two?” and “Mixed-code interactions in China’s social media communities”, explaining the challenges and opportunities of English as a lingua franca from various perspectives.

Professor Michael Halliday and Professor Ruqaiya Hasan, both renowned scholars in systemic functional linguistics, made their concluding remarks, looking back at this year’s IAWE annual conference and affirming its contribution to linguistic research. The next IAWE annual conference will be held at Arizona State University, USA in 2013.

The annual conference attracted scholars and students from around the world. They asked in-depth questions and the speakers answered in detail. Academic interactions sparkled deliberations and new ideas on topics related to world Englishes.