On the morning of April 20th, academic lectures were held by School of Foreign Languages (SFL) in Room C103 of Leyu Building as a celebration of the 15th anniversary of its foundation. Professor Li Jie, from Shantou University, was invited to give a lecture titled “On the Development of Language Learners’ Metaphorical Competence from an Ontogenetic Perspective.” He underlined the key importance of the mastery of metaphor in expression and communication, and stated that the competence a language learner obtained to express oneself in terms of metaphor and the ability to understand metaphors can be taken as criteria during the development of language proficiency. He believed, the ontogenesis is related to the language development of an individual, reflecting his or her development of language proficiency from simple to complex, from concrete to abstract, and from explicit to metaphorical. Therefore, the study of the ontogenesis would be enlightening for language teaching, especially for foreign language teaching. At the ending Q&A session, Professor Li also had a discussion with students about network-based language, the development and the planning of language and other subjects.

    In the afternoon, Professor Liu Yi from Shenzhen University gave his lecture naming “the Construction of ‘Belt and Road’ International Discourse System.” Adopting the functional linguistics approach, he provided such five perspectives of discourse analysis as the metaphorical, summary, deferential, external and implied perspective. Professor Liu analyzed the “Belt and Road” international discourse system in three developing stages from the five perspectives. He pointed out, being vigorous and extroverted, the system centering on world context shows that China is active to embrace the world and strive for interests of developing countries with the West using a universally recognized discourse model.

    SFL always pays much attention to promote its students’ academic accomplishment and cultivate their consciousness of academic study. Through the 15th anniversary of the school foundation, renowned professors at home and abroad were invited to give lectures and a sound academic atmosphere was thus promoted.