Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Cordial greetings from the beautiful campus of Shantou University (STU)!
As Chairman of the Organising Committee of the 10th International Conference on Converging and Diverging Paths: ELT in a Changing Environment, I am very pleased to tell you that my colleagues at the English Language Center (ELC), College of Liberal Arts (CLA) have been working diligently to create a multicultural forum for you all to present and share your rich teaching/research experience, new ideas and findings in TESOL. As you may know, 2021 marks the 18th anniversary of the establishment of our ELC (2003). In 2002, with the generous support from the Li Ka Shing Foundation, STU successfully started the English Enhancement Programme under the leadership of the visionary Julia Hsiao, the then Vice Chancellor of STU. The past 18 years have witnessed the healthy growth and great development of the ELC in terms of curriculum design, communicative approach for language teaching, co-curricular activities and services (such as those offered at our CILL - Center for Independent Language Learning) and the building of an innovative, competitive and truly international team of TESOL professionals and researchers from Greater China and many other countries such as Brazil, Cuba, the Czech Republic, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Turkey, the United Kingdom as well as the United States of America.
I also feel proud and privileged to tell you that we have invited a great team of leading scholars from the international TESOL research community who will speak at this conference in April 2021. They are Professor Xuesong (Andy) GAO from the University of New South Wales (Australia), Professor LI Daguo from the University of Reading (UK), Professor Angel LIN from Simon Fraser University (Canada), Professor LIU Jianda from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (China), Professor PENG Jian-e from Shantou University (China), Professor Willy RENANDYA from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and Professor WANG Haixiao from Nanjing University (China). Their presence and keynote presentations at the conference will be a great source of inspiration for all of us laboring in the TESOL vineyard.
Ladies and gentlemen, with your valuable participation and our great commitment to serving you and facilitating discussions, we are expecting a great forum to exchange innovative ideas, an open platform to demonstrate best practices, a spacious arena to display original research and a warm reunion to share our learning/teaching experiences in and out of the conference hall. As ELT practitioners and researchers, we shall be addressing a whole range of ELT issues in relation to our various teaching practices and diverse cultural settings such as ELT policies and curriculum design, ELT methods and global competence, language testing and assessment, teacher education and cognition, content and language integrated learning, technology enhanced ELT, learner needs and autonomy, ELT, critical literacies and translation.
Here at the ELC, while being firmly committed to the mission of cultivating in our students key attributes and skills such as “Proficiency”, “Autonomy”, “Sustainability”, “Intercultural Competence” and “Critical Thinking”, we have been actively conducting conversations between traditional approaches and innovative theories regarding the incorporation of new technologies and digital learning platforms into ELT. The ELC of Shantou University is an innovative and professional institution, and I am truly proud of what my colleagues do and also of what has been achieved over the years. It is with great pride, pleasure and sincerity that I warmly invite you to come and share your teaching and research experience with us at this global gathering.
We look forward to welcoming old friends back and new friends to Shantou University in April 2021!
Professor Mao Sihui (PhD)
Dean of College of Liberal Arts &
Executive Director of the English Language Center
Shantou University