ISFC32 Sydney

[Jim Martin]

All

Just a note to welcome anyone interested to the 32 International
Systemic Functional Congress in Sydney, this July 17-22. Our congress
theme is 'Discourses of hope: peace, reconciliation, learning and change'.

We're now preparing for more than 270 presentations, and loading
abstracts onto the website over the next couple of weeks for previewing
(an overview of the provisional program is now available):

http://www.asfla.org.au/isfc2005/

Heaps to look forward to in July, including two very exciting appetisers
(with links to the website):

The Pre-ISFC 2005 Institute: Resourcing Researchers and Tooling
Teachers, July 11-15

&

The 1st Computational Systemic Functional Grammar Conference, July 16!

We've had to make a couple of last minute adjustments to our plenary
program, due to the late withdrawal of a couple of speakers for personal
reasons.

Here's the current line-up (abstracts, where available, now on-line, as
well as titles and abstracts for the plenary speakers' parallel workshop
sessions on July 22):

Terrence Deacon, U C Berkeley Anthropology and Neuroscience
"On the empty space where we expected to find a language template:
how increased complexity evolves by off-loading epigenetic control"

Ghassan Hage, Anthropology, University of Sydney
"Hope and hoping in warring societies "

Christopher Jordens, University of Sydney
"Narrative schmarrative! Generating a discourse of cancer survivorship"

Mary Macken-Horarik, University of Canberra
"Towards a semiotics of hope: new kinds of complementarity and new kinds
of genesis in refugee discourses"

J R Martin, University of Sydney
"Vernacular deconstruction: undermining spin"

Christian Matthiessen
Multilingual humanity, multilingual studies: hope or despair?

Clare Painter, University of New South Wales
"Affective and interpersonal agency in learning language and learning
through language in early childhood"

John M. Swales, University of Michigan
"The flavour and structure of academic speech"

Theo van Leeuwen, University of Technology, Sydney
"Discourses of choice"

One of the innovations for this year's program is the introduction of
colloquia (1 or 2 day long thematic sessions facilitating a range of
interactions and presentations) - as some of you might have experienced
at AAAL meetings. These will run alongside parallel papers.

Marking the debut of this format are the following themes and teams:

"Expanding multimodal discourses of hope, reconciliation and peace"
(Hodge, Stenglin, van Leeuwen, Martinec)

"Multimodal corpora, MCA, Multimodal discourse analysis"
(Baldry, Thibault, O'Halloran)

"Expanding the notion of explicit instruction: the potential of
genre-based tasks"
(Byrnes, Ryshina, Liamkina, Crane, Maxim)

"Clinical analysis: pushing the boundaries"
(Ferguson and Togher, Sherratt and Spencer, Mortensen and Armstrong,
Thomson, Hand)

"Describing multilinguality: typology of processes of motion and
(de)lexicalization"
(Teruya, Kumar, Caffarel, Matthiessen, Thoma, Akerejola, Hita, Lavid,
Anvarhaghighi, Bardi, Patpong, Petersen)

"Corpus linguistics: representing systemic networks and analyses in XML"
(Wu, Bateman, O'Donnell, Matthiessen)

"SFL and LOTE teaching"
(Caffarel, Piazza, Colombi, Moyano)

"Multilingual case studies of the news media"
(Britt-Hoglund, Economou, Caffarel and Rechniewski, Lukin, White,
McDonald, Knox and Patpong, Thompson and Fukui, Sano)

"Recontextualising academic knowledge"
(Coffin, Ventola, Iedema and Scheeres, Chen, Hood and Maton)

"Evaluative discourse analysis"
(White, Miller, Hood and Matruglio, Sano, Coffin, Don)

Len Unsworth has put together a very engaging Language in Education Day
program, featuring keynote addresses and corresponding follow-up
workshops, as well as parallel papers, and materials & methods showcase
presentations - a fantastic opportunity to catch up on the latest work
of the Sydney School and related approaches.

An opening plenary by Fran Christie will be followed by 9 parallel
keynote sessions:

"Genre in an outcome-based era: re-locating purpose across K-12 curriculum"
(Kristina Love)

"Language, literature and literacy in early childhood: A functional
perspective"
(Jane Torr)

"Toward an enriched model of scaffolding: implications for ESL pedagogy"
(Jenny Hammond)

"Genre knowledge and teaching academic writing"
(Brian Paltridge)

"A grammatical perspective on teaching and learning"
(John Polias & Brian Dare)

"Hybrid approaches to teaching language education"
(Anne Thwaite & Judith Rivalland)

"Image/text relations in childrens literary texts and e-texts:
Interfacing social semiotic theory and practical literacy pedagogy"
(Len Unsworth)

"Language development in adolescence"
(Bev Derewianka, Helen Lewis, Ken Cruickshank)

"Explicit Systematic Quality Teaching (ESQT) through the Application of
SFL"
(Brian Miller)

cheers

Jim Martin