Dec.26,2011
At the invitation of the Institute of Linguistics, Prof. Alister Cumming, the international expert of applied linguistics and director of Modern Language Center, Toronto University, and Prof. Razika Sanaoui from York University, came to visit Zhejiang University from Dec. 7th to 10th, 2011. On the morning of Dec. 8th, they respectively delivered two spectacular lectures for our teachers and students. Hosted Prof. He Lianzhen, the dean of SIS, the two lectures appealed over 50 people and lasted for nearly 3 hours.
In the first lecture, Prof. Alister Cumming started from the function of test and presented the credibility and validity in writing test, the process of grading, the typical order of grading and those factors’ functions in writing teaching. Furthermore, he pointed out some existing difficulties, the phrases of feedback, the aiming problems, and the means of feedback included. Finally, Prof. Cumming put forward several trends in writing test. The lecture was thought-provoking with rich contents. After the lecture, teachers and students participated in raising questions positively and launched a big discussion about the problems related to writing test. Prof. Cumming made patient response and detailed instructions.
In the second lecture, Prof. Razika Sanaoui analyzed the researches made by foreign language teachers on use, attitudes and challenges of mother tongue and second language. He gave a detailed account about a case study in which four teachers whose mother tongue were not French were researched in terms of the use of English in their French immersion approach classes. Also, he made related analysis towards its research results combining with theory. The explaining of Prof. Sanaoui was lively and easy to be understood, arousing much laughter there. His research had a close tie with transition between Chinese and English in foreign language classes of China thus all the Chinese teachers and students were inspired deeply.
The two lectures ended in warm applauses from all the people present there. Participators broadened their research horizons in language test and foreign language teaching, improved the interest of research and benefited a lot.
(Translated by CHEN Qian)
