Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Department of English Distinguished Lecture Series
Prof. Ren Wei
‘Pragmatic strategies in Chinese speakers’ emails in English as a lingua franca communication’
Friday 8 March 2019, 10:30
Venue: E21-3118
All are Welcome Abstract: Although there has been a steady rise of empirical studies examining pragmatic strategies in oral communication using English as a lingua franca (ELF), there have been relatively few published studies about pragmatic strategies in written ELF communication. Email, despite its current popularity, has scarcely been examined in ELF communication. To extend the existing research on ELF into email discourse, this talk will present a study investigating Chinese-English bilingual professionals’ real-life emails in ELF communication. The talk will analyse and discuss the pragmatic strategies employed by the Chinese bilingual professionals both to solve and to avoid problems of understanding when writing their emails in ELF communication. The talk will also discuss pedagogical implications of integrating ELF research into English learning and teaching.
Biography: Professor Wei REN currently works at the School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, Beijing, China. Wei’s research interests include Second Language Pragmatics, Pragmatics, and Second Language Research. He has also published widely on Chinese Internet and Social Media communication, and recently published a guest-edited Special Issue on Chinese Digital Media in the SSCI journal Discourse, Context and Media (2018). |