At 7:30p.m.on April 20th, 2018, School of Foreign Languages held the second salon for academic research of this semester in Room B107 of Leyu Building, with more than twenty participants including full-time teachers and administrative staff. It was hosted by Professor Tao Wenhao, Dean and Party Secretary of SFL who also invited Professor Li Jie, from Shan Tou University, and Professor Liu Yi, from Shen Zhen University as distinguished guests of the night. The salon aimed to fulfill “The Plan of Improving Teachers’ Capacity of Academic Research”, which provided a favorable academic atmosphere and offered teachers opportunity to improve their capacity of academic research.
Firstly, Professor Li Jie shared the experience about the shift from teaching-oriented to research-oriented of teachers in Shantou University. He encouraged teachers to constantly improve their capacity of academic research by finding out personal interest, focusing on existing research results, applying for scientific research projects and writing thesis with repeatedly modifications. Then Professor Liu Yi introduced the development of system-functional linguistics. He emphasized the necessity of upgrading education background, studying in an academic atmosphere, and extracting personal experience to knowledge. Also, he shared with all teachers his nine word proverb that “Reading more, thinking more and writing more."
Then, a heated discussion started concerning fields such as the theoretical dimension of children’s second language acquisition, discourse analysis perspective, the construction and usage of corpus and the orientation of college English reform. At the end of the salon, Professor Tao Wenhao gave a summary and encouraged teachers to keep reading, thinking and writing, which benefited teachers a lot.
