Prof. Gass is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages at Michigan State University. Her research is in Second Language Acquisition and includes the areas of Input and Interaction, Language Universals and Language Transfer.

More recently she has become interested in the area of attention and how it relates to acquisition. She has written/edited a number of books on second language acquisition and has taught and lectured in various parts of the world. She co-edits Second Language Research: Theoretical Issues with Jacquelyn Schachter and Second Language Research: Methodological Issues with Alison Mackey- both published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Currently at MSU, she is the Director of the English Language Center, Co-Director of the Center for Language Education And Research at Michigan State University, and Director of the Second Language Studies Ph.D. Program. She is also President of the International Association of Applied Linguistics.

For more information, please check Prof. Gass' profile on Michigan State University.

Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, and Language Teaching: Creating a Research Link

In this paper, I will begin by discussing areas of overlap between applied linguistics, broadly construed, second language acquisition (SLA), and language teaching. I will point out areas where I do and do not see overlap between SLA and language teaching. The bulk of the paper will take one area of my current research, the use of captions in foreign language learning, and discuss how this research area can address issues of language processing and also areas of language teaching. I will draw on earlier research by Gass (1997) who argued that interaction often serves as a priming device, thereby representing the setting of the stage for learning rather than being a forum for actual learning. The same may be the case for captioning, especially when video texts are presented more than once. A focus of the study will be on script differences between the L1 and the L2. I will present data based on comprehension of captioned text as well as data from an eye-tracking that sets out to examine where the focus of attention is when learners are confronted with video that is captioned in the L2. Throughout, I will focus on how one research area can inform both acquisition and pedagogy.

Prof. Michael Hoey has been Baines Professor of English Language at the University of Liverpool since 1993 and is currently Pro-Vice- Chancellor for Internationalisation. He is a former Dean of Arts (2008-2009) and was Director of the Applied English Language studies unit at the university between 1993 and 2003. He is an academician of the Academy of Social Sciences and a member of Council at the University of Chester; he is a member of the Audit & Risk Committees of both organisations. He was for many years chair of the AQA's English Advisory Committee and of the Religious Studies & Philosophy Advisory Committee, and was a member of AQA's Education and Training Committee. He also chaired for AQA a working group that designed a new A level in Critical Thinking. He is currently Director of the University of Liverpool's Confucius Institute.

As a linguist he is much published in the fields of discourse analysis, applied linguistics & ELT and corpus linguistics, being the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, the editor or co-editor of two more and the author of over 80 articles. One of his books (Patterns of Lexis in Text, 1991) won the Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union Award for best book in applied linguistics; another (Lexical Priming, 2005) was shortlisted for best book in applied linguistics by the British Association of Applied Linguistics. His applied linguistic research has led to his lecturing in over 40 countries. He is co-editor with Tony McEnery of a series of books on advances in corpus linguistics and chief consultant to Macmillan's Dictionaries, one of which also won a Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union Award.

The above introduction is provided by the Office of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool. More information of Prof. Hoey can be found on his Wikipedia page.

How a right knowledge of Chinese might be used to help in the learning of English (and how a wrong knowledge won’t help at all)

Traditional descriptions of language have separated grammar and vocabulary, with grammars (pedagogical or academic) describing the general syntactic rules of the language and dictionaries and thesauri describing the meanings and relationships of vocabulary. This separation is supported neither by psycholinguistic experimentation nor by corpus-linguistic data. Lexical priming theory attempts to provide a description of language that is compatible with the psycholinguistic and corpus evidence; the theory works on the assumption that vocabulary is a great deal more complicated than previously allowed for and that grammar is much simpler and less central. If this is true, then some ways of teaching of English are confirmed and some need changing. Chinese grammar and English grammar are very different and therefore knowledge of Chinese hasn’t helped much in the learning of English, but preliminary examination of the vocabulary of Chinese suggests more in common with English as far as the way it is organised than might be expected. Used rightly, a knowledge of Chinese might help a Chinese learner of English (and vice versa). Old-fashioned descriptions, though, definitely won’t.