The School of Languages and Area Studies presents Language in the real world: Theory.Pedagogy.Practice, a one-day conference at on Saturday 12 May 2012 at the University.

Call for papers

The School of Languages and Area Studies would like to invite proposals for 30-minute presentations or 60-minute workshops exploring the relationship between theory, pedagogy and practice in one of the following broad areas:

• (Critical) discourse analysis
• Professional communication/Business discourse
• Forensic linguistics
• The development of teaching/learning materials
• English/Foreign language education

In particular the School would welcome cooperation with the Department of Psychology (discourse and conversation analysis), the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies (forensic linguistics) and Portsmouth Business School (business communication).

Please submit abstracts of 300 words to litrew@port.ac.uk. The deadline for proposals is 4 March 2012.

About the conference

Keynote speakers:

• Dr Almut Koester, University of Birmingham
• Ms Amanda Vickers, Managing Director of Speak-First

The aim of this one-day conference is to bring together academics and other professionals and provide them with a shared forum in which they can discuss, probe and/or challenge the relevance of (the teaching of) Applied Linguistics for the 'real world' outside the boundaries of academia.

Applied Linguistics is commonly said to be 'an interdisciplinary field of research and practice dealing with practical problems of language and communication' (AILA). It is this 'practical' orientation that distinguishes Applied Linguistics from Descriptive Linguistics.

In spite of this, in Higher Education, Applied Linguistics has traditionally tended to be either taught from a rather descriptive perspective, especially in the form of Discourse Analysis, or is related solely to language teaching, the area where the connection between theory and practice is clearest.

In recent years, however, there has been a move towards bringing the pedagogy of Applied Linguistics closer to "actual" real world problems involving language'(International Journal of Applied Linguistics). Two areas in which this has been particularly evident are the discourse of the workplace and forensic linguistics.

Find out more

For more information, please visit www.port.ac.uk/languageintherealworld or in Facebook at www.facebook.com/pages/Language-in-the-Real-World/365899916757243.