Past Seminars

For decades, institutions, businesses, and individuals have engaged in discourse regarding their commitment to building a better world. In 2024, however, we are still a long way from achieving sustainable development. This new rhetoric is the result of corporate peer pressure, increased activism and consumer engagement on social media, and growing risks for reputational damage and financial impacts on corporations. Among all business sectors, luxury has historically been associated with qualities such as overconsumption and social stratification that do not naturally align with sustainability (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017; Veblen, 1957), however, it has been integrating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into corporate discourse. This study is concerned with the semiotic construction of meanings related to the renegotiation of the oxymoronic concept of ‘sustainable luxury’ (Wells et al. 2021). This study adopts a social semiotic approach to analyse Instagram posts shared by luxury brands in 2019, 2020 and 2021 (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Nervino, 2018). The analysis shows how the discourse shared on Instagram constructs environmental, social, and governance claims by deploying a diversified set of semiotic resources enacting both conceptual and narrative processes, intertextual references, cohesive devices such as colour and medium-specific features to articulate a call for collective action and play the role of a catalyst for certain causes. This study is part of an overarching project which investigates sustainable corporate discourse and highlights how discourse enables individuals, public and private entities to advocate, influence, and drive change in the society. Among the outcome from this project, digital multimodal composing of sustainability discourse has been integrated into relevant courses and a new course ‘The Language of Sustainability’ has been developed and will launch next academic year.

Registration Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfltl1mELS0FVmanOy_WLyjLFBoYT7NFHTogm7Yk8yRYIBnOg/viewform?usp=sf_link

The value of using videos in language teaching is well documented. Yet language teachers‘ instructional use of videos remains undertheorized. Given that contemporary language learners are increasingly exposed to videos and that language teachers play a critical role in actualizing the benefits of videos for learners, there is a critical need to understand the nature of video use in language classrooms. In this talk, I will present a social semiotic examination of video use in language teaching and call for developing language teachers’ multimodal awareness and social semiotic competences for more productive use of videos in language and literacy education.  

In this talk, I will first discuss the general peer review process of international refereed journals. Then I will draw on my own experience of being an author, a reviewer, and a journal editor to discuss top desk rejection reasons by education and linguistics journals. Lastly, I will share some thoughts on how to improve the quality of a manuscript in order to get it pass the preliminary screening and into the review process. This talk will be informative for inexperienced authors who aspire to get published in high-quality international journals.

Traditional tools for corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) predominantly cater to research needs, often neglecting the pedagogical aspect crucial for effective teaching and learning. This disconnect has led to a notable decline in DDL engagement post-initial training, largely attributed to issues surrounding tool usability. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces CorpusMate, a novel corpus tool explicitly designed with user-friendliness in mind. Developed in response to insights gathered from secondary language learners and educators in Australia, CorpusMate stands out for its inclusivity of diverse written and spoken corpora, spanning 20 distinct disciplinary subjects. The tool boasts an array of functionalities, including versatile concordancing, n-gram analysis, and dynamic data visualization features, all aimed at facilitating a seamless DDL experience for its users. This seminar  also provides a comprehensive guide to CorpusMate’s primary functions, highlighting its utility in lesson planning and material development for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses in Australia, as well as in teacher training programs in Brazil and Vietnam. Additionally, the talk delves into the implications and potential adaptations of DDL methodologies in the emerging post-ChatGPT era, offering critical insights into the evolving landscape of technology-enhanced language learning and teaching.