St Mary’s to Host Linguistics Conference

The School of Communication, Culture and Creative Arts at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham is set to host a two-day linguistics conference on the 4^th and 5^th July at its Strawberry Hill campus. Entitled ‘Linking teaching and learning in language education’, this is the 9^th annual conference of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Language Learning and Teaching Special Interest Group. Research into the nature of language teaching and learning continues to be a very active field of inquiry with widely differing perspectives, from that of exploring learning as a matter of how the human mind processes linguistic data, to that of situating language learning inside its individual, social and cultural contexts. The conference will explore how language teaching can exploit social contexts on the one hand, and cognitive capacities and restraints on the other, to create optimal opportunities for developing proficiency in a second language. Delegates will be welcomed from across the world, including four internationally renowned plenary speakers: Professor Zoltan Dornyei (University of Nottingham), Professor Rod Ellis (University of Auckland), Dr Leila Ranta (University of Alberta) and Professor Jill Wigglesworth (University of Melbourne). For more information about the conference and to book a place, please visit the website http://www.stmarys.ac.uk/baal-language-learning-conference/