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Launching Ceremony of Discourse & Interaction Group (DIG)
On the afternoon of January 7th, 2015, the launching ceremony of Discourse & Interaction Group (DIG) was held by theSchool of Foreign Languages (SFL). It is the first research team in China that takes pure discourse analysis as its research method and natural real verbal communication as its research object. Li Yue’e, vice-chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Committee of Shanxi Province, and Gao Ce, vice-president of Shanxi University, attended the ceremony. Some teachers of SFL and teacher representatives of other brother universities in Shanxi Province as well as master and PhD students of SFL also attended the launching ceremony.
Professor Li Yue’e is one of the initiators of the research on discourse & interaction and the founder of the very research in SFL. In the ceremony, she emphasized the importance of the research on discourse & interaction and that she really took great pride in her former students’ shouldering the mission of promoting the development of the research on discourse & interaction in China. At the same time, she also expounded some specific qualities required for the research team members.
Vice-president Gao Ce gave credit to SFL for its achievements in the research on discourse & interaction and showed great approval for its cooperative studies with international peer experts. He also hoped that Shanxi University would become the base and center of the research on discourse & interaction and that the career could be passed on from generation to generation in SFL, with a research team of the rational age and knowledge structure well established.
In this ceremony, the initiators of this research group, Professor Yu Guodong and Professor Wu Yaxin, read the congratulatory letters from Professor John Heritage, chairman of International Society of Conversation Analysis (ISCA), Professor Paul Drew, vice chairman of ISCA, Professor Anita Pomerantz, a famous conversation analyst, Professor Robert E. Sanders, the first editor-in-chief of the top journal “Research on Language & Social Interaction”, and Professor K. K. Luke, a famous conversation analyst in Chinese circles and dean of Linguistics Department of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In these letters, all the eminent scholars expressed their common wishes to provide ready help to the development of conversation analysis in China and also expected that more and more research achievements based on Chinese natural conversation corpus would be published in international academic journals.
After the ceremony, Professor Yu Guodong and Professor Wu Yaxin made academic reports respectively on “What is Conversation Analysis?” and “Why do We Need to Do Conversation Analysis Research?”
School of Foreign Languages
Jan 7th, 2015