The updated programme with presentation titles can be found here. A complete programme with abstracts can be downloaded here.

The programme starts on Wednesday afternoon (4 July) with two workshops for (young) researchers geared towards academic presentations and publishing. The main conference programme (5 – 7 July) starts on Thursday morning with an official opening and lasts until Saturday afternoon (around 17.00). The social programme will take place on Friday evening (more info on the social programme page).

NB: The preconference workshops are at the VU Metropolitan Building, Buitenveldertselaan 3, Amsterdam. From Thursday until Saturday the conference will be at VU Griffioen cultural centre, Uilenstede 106, Amstelveen (see more at conference venue).

Preconference workshops

13.00 – 14.30 – Speak up: How to teach or present effectively in English

Boost your English presentation skills in this 1,5-hour workshop on effective teaching and presenting in academic English. You will receive tips and practice with effective explanations, clever use of structure, and involving the audience.

Required preparation: think of a topic or concept that you teach or present on and be ready to give a tiny, coherent explanation on it for one minute

Led by: Marjolein Cremer, psycholinguist and university teacher trainer

15.00 – 16.30 – Getting published in ‘Language Awareness’

Are you planning to submit a manuscript to Language Awareness? In this session, the editors of the journal will offer practical advice about how to improve your odds of acceptance. The session will begin with a review of the aims and scope of the journal and a survey of topics that have appeared in Language Awareness since it began in 1992. Next the review and revision process will be explained from both the editor’s and the author’s perspective. The session will end with an opportunity for audience members to ask their own questions about academic publishing.

Led by: Leila Ranta and Joanna White, main editors of the journal Language Awareness

Keynote speakers

Angela Creese – Angela Creese (University of Birmingham) is Professor of Educational Linguistics in the School of Education, University of Birmingham. Her research and teaching cross references anthropology, linguistics and education. She uses ethnography to investigate ideologies, and interactions in social life. Her research publications cover urban multilingualism, linguistic ethnography, and language education. Angela is the director of the TLANG project which investigates how multilingualism can be used as a resource for communication, creativity and civic participation when people bring different histories and biographies into contact. The project works with a wide range of different stakeholders and professionals and develops partnerships with national and international organisations such as museums, libraries, advocacy networks and artists and aims to bring a multilingual orientation to documenting social practice.

James Cummins – James Cummins (University of Toronto) is (emeritus) Professor with the department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at OISE. Dr. Cummins holds a Canada Resarch Chair (Tier 1) and has been a recipient of the International Reading Association’s Albert J. Harris award (1979). He also received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the Bank Street College of Education in New York City (1997). In recent years, he has been a co-investigator on a large-scale SSHRC-funded project entitled “From Literacy to Multiliteracies: Designing Learning Environments for Knowledge Generation within the New Economy.” He is currently involved in a project to validate the Ontario Ministry of Education’s Steps to English Proficiency assessment tool. He is also conducting a research review on English Language Learners’ academic trajectories. Dr. Cummins has co-authored several books on literacies in education, and has seen his

Gerard Steen – Gerard Steen (Universiteit van Amsterdam) is professor of Language and Communicatioon at the University of Amsterdam and founding director of the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam. He is developing a new theory of metaphor called Deliberate Metaphor Theory and his latest research program, sponsored by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research NWO, addresses Resistance to Metaphor, with PhD projects in science, the media, politics, and health. Optimal resistance to and intervention by metaphor in all of these domains of discourse is crucially dependent on a degree of metaphor awareness by language users. This requires new research and then participant training of its own. In addition, metaphor awareness is not only a matter of language awareness but also of awareness of the discourse situation(s) in which metaphor awareness is needed, allowed, promoted, developed and utilized. We need to understand how this works by building a bridge between contemporary metaphor research and language awareness research for these various domains of discourse.

Elizabeth Stokoe – Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. She uses conversation analysis to understand how talk works – from first dates to police interrogations; from medical communication to crisis negotiation. Outside the university, she runs workshops with doctors, mediators, salespeople, police and other professionals using her research-based communication training method called the “Conversation Analytic Role-play Method”. She is one of thirteen WIRED 2015 Innovation Fellows; has given TEDx, New Scientist, SciFoo/Google and Royal Institution lectures, and her research and biography were featured on the BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific.