B. Kumaravadivelu

Professor

Department of Linguistics & Language Development

San José State University, USA

 

B. Kumaravadivelu was educated at the Universities of Madras in India, Lancaster in Britain, and Michigan in the USA.  He is currently Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at San Jose State University, California.  His areas of research interest include language teaching methods, teacher education, classroom discourse analysis, postmethod pedagogy, and cultural globalization.  He is the author of Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for Language Teaching, (Yale University Press, 2003), Understanding Language Teaching:  From Method to Postmethod (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), and Cultural Globalization and Language Education (Yale University Press, 2008). He has published several research articles in journals such as TESOL Quarterly, English Language Teaching Journal, International Review of Applied Linguistics, Applied Language Learning, RELC Journal, ITL Review.  He has also served as a member of the Editorial Board of several internationally reputed journals such as TESOL Quarterly. He has delivered invited keynote/plenary addresses in international conferences held in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, England, Finland, Hong Kong, Mexico and the USA.

 

A common thread that runs through Professor Kumaravadivelu’s work on language teaching and teacher education is a postmodern and postcolonial perspective that motivates a desire to understand the language classroom not just in its linguistic complexities but also in all its historical, political, social and cultural ones. It is this critical orientation that is reflected in his pioneering work on postmethod pedagogy, which seeks to direct practicing and prospective language teachers away from knowledge transmission and towards knowledge generation; away from pedagogic dependence and towards pedagogic independence. It is also reflected in his most recent work on the teaching of culture in a global society, which is sensitive to the complexities of the political, religious and cultural tensions that cultural globalization has brought about.

 

 

Keynote Speakers

Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication

Faculty of English Language and Literature

University of Oxford, UK

 

Jean Aitchison was Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford from 1993-2003, and is now an Emeritus Professorial Fellow at Worcester College. Her research and writing is concerned with the mental lexicon, language change, and the language of the media. She gave the 1996 BBC Reith lectures on `The language web’.

 

She is the author of The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. 5th edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.  ISBN 978-0-415-42016-7 (hbk), 978-0-415-42022-8 (pbk).

 

The Word Weavers: Newshounds and Wordsmiths . Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007.  ISBN: 0-521-83245-4 (hbk);  0-521-54007-0 (pbk).

 

Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edition. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0-521-79155-3 (hbk) 0-521-79535-4 (pbk).

 

The Seeds of Speech: Language Origin and Evolution. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN: 0-521-46246-0 (hbk.), 0-521-46793-4 (pbk). Published with new extended introduction, in C.U.P. Canto series, 2000. ISBN: 0-521-78571-5.

 

Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 3rd edition, 2003. ISBN: 0-631-23243-5 (hbk), 0631-23244-3 (pbk.).

 

The Language web: The Power and Problem of Words. 1996 BBC Reith lectures. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-521-573858 (hbk) 0-521-574757 (pbk).

 

Linguistics (London: Hodder Headline, Teach Yourself Books, 6th edition, 2003. ISBN: 0-340-87083-4).  

 

A Glossary of Language and Mind. Revised edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-7486-1824-4 (pbk);  NY: OUP, 2003. ISBN: 0-19-522007-2 (pbk).

 

Language Joyriding  An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 16 November 1993. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.  ISBN: 0-19-952264-2.

 

New media language. Edited with Diana Lewis. London: Routledge, 2003. ISBN: 0-415-28303-5 (hbk); 0-415-28304-3 (pbk).

 

 

 

formerly University of Surrey, UK

 

John Ayto is a lexicographer and writer on words. Over the past twenty years his publications have ranged widely over various areas of English vocabulary, from its deep history (in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins) to its most up-to-date manifestations (in, for example, A Century of New Words and the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang), and some of his most recent work (Brewer's Britain and Ireland, An Encyclopedia of Surnames) has explored links between proper names and cultural identity. He has also assumed the editorship of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, a venerable British reference institution now into its third century. For many years he taught postgraduate courses in lexicography at the University of Surrey, giving future lexicographers and translators a grounding in the history, theory and practice of dictionary-making, and he has also lectured widely in the UK and around the world. He appears regularly on radio (and occasionally on television) talking about words and current usage (he is often called on, for instance, by Today, BBC Radio's flagship current-affairs programme, when word-related stories hit the headlines). His twin passions are words and food, which he was able to bring together in a historical dictionary of English gastronomic terminology (currently available under the title An A-Z of Food and Drink, OUP 2002).

 

Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies

School of English Studies, Faculty of Arts

The University of Nottingham, UK

 

John McRae has been Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies at the University of Nottingham since 1992 and is now Senior Teaching Fellow. Since the publication of Reading Between the Lines in 1984 he has been at the forefront of work on the language and literature interface. He has written or edited well over fifty books, and is probably best known for Literature with a small ‘l’  which was recently reissued by Anvil Press, Manila, and is also being republished in 2008 in an expanded version entitled Five Skills English – literature with a small ‘l’ revisited.

 

His many publications include Chapter and Verse (OUP, 1990), The Language of Poetry (Routledge, 1998), and, with Ronald  Carter, The Penguin Guide to English Literature (1995/2001), The Routledge History of Literature in English (1997/2001), Language, Literature  and the Learner (Longman, 1996) and The Routledge Guide to Modern Writing (2004).   They are also series editors of Penguin Student Editions, for which Professor McRae edited Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, A Passage to India, The Turn of the Screw, The Garden Party and several other titles.  The second edition of The Routledge History of Literature in English won the English Speaking Union Duke of Edinburgh Award in 2001, and Now Read On: a course in multi-cultural reading, with Malachi. Edwin Vethamani was shortlisted for the same award in 1999.

 

Professor McRae has recently spoken in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, Cuba, Cyprus, Estonia, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Thailand, Uruguay and Venezuela.  For some years he was Visiting Professor at Portland State University, Oregon, USA; he is Distinguished Guest Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing and at Ocean University, Qingdao, China, and he currently holds Visiting Professorships at Universities in India, Malaysia, Palestine and Spain. He also works in theatre worldwide and has directed plays from Verona to Vladivostok; he performed his one man Shakespeare show in Singapore in July 2007.

 

Associate Professor

Department of English Language & Literature

National University of Singapore

 

Rajeev S. Patke was educated in India and at Oxford, and teaches at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include postcolonial writing, cultural studies with specific reference to Adorno and Benjamin, and relations between poetry and painting. Currently, he coordinates the graduate studies program at the Department of English Language and Literture and teaches modules on poetry and painting, SF, and Irish poetry. In collaboration with the Open University (Singapore) he has produced two audio CDs of Singapore poets reading from their work. Book publications include The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), and Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). He is currently completing a co-authored Concise Routledge History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (forthcoming 2009) and a co-edited volume titled A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2008). His hobbies include collecting and digitizing Indian classical music and playing chess (in which he takes losses gracefully).