Professor Eija Ventola fromAalto University,Finland, was invited to present her reflections on the reading, writing and presenting in the new context at theNationalKeyResearchCenterfor Linguistics & Applied Linguistics on September 23, 2014. Professor Ventola is a leading scholar in Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Studies, and has been a member of The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters since 2011.

Professor Eija Ventola first contextualized the talk by pointing out that each phase of students’ education requires different types of socialization and the expectations of knowledge formation through reading, writing and presentation at tertiary level may also considerably differ from those of the school. She used the Finnish education system of language teaching as an example to discuss the potential difficulties students face at different stages. After the contextualization, Professor Ventola discussed how to improve students’ literacy competence from the perspectives of language, multi-semiotic and technology. With regard to language teaching, Professor Ventola emphasized that it is important to raise students’ awareness of linguistic features ranging from informal to formal, and from oral to written. She introduced the concepts of lexical density and grammatical metaphor as practical tools for developing students’ genre awareness. Meanwhile, language is never used in isolation from resources such as layout, space, and gesture. Therefore, Professor Ventola called for our attention to non-verbal resources in language teaching. She showed a brief analysis of four conference presentations to demonstrate how non-verbal resources could have impact on the overall communicative effect of the presentations. She also pointed out the need for theorizing multimodal studies as related to language teaching. When addressing the functions of technology in language teaching, Professor Ventola cautioned that we should not be used by technology. She reviewed the history of technology in teaching from Socrates’ dialogic teaching to nowadays’ virtual lecturing, and called for discourse design together with technology. She illustrated the impact of technology on communication by analyzing the generic structure of an ethnographer’s conference presentation with slides. Professor Eija Ventola concluded by a call for more training for both teachers and students on the issues of language, multi-semiotic and technology addressed in the talk. Afterwards, Professor Ventola exchanged with the attendants her insights on issues such as the meaning of gesture in different cultures and the discursivity of academic writing in humanities.

The talk given by Professor Eija Ventola is specially designed for the center to address the needs of scholars from both fields of Second Language Acquisition and Public Discourse Studies, which are correspondingly the strong tradition and newly emerged area of research at the center. Attendants of the talk include not only scholars from the center, but also fromSunYatSenUniversityandJinanUniversity.