Invited by the School of Foreign Language Education, Professor Ken Hyland, the world’s leading scholar in applied linguistics from the University of East Anglia, gave an academic lecture entitled “We are what we write: the role of writing in the academy” in the International Academic Lecture Hall on the Central Campus on March 14th, 2024. The lecture was moderated by Professor Jiang Feng, Associate Dean of the School of Foreign Language Education. Over 100 postgraduate students and supervisors attended the lecture.
At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Jiang Feng briefly introduced the academic background of Professor Ken Hyland, whose research areas mainly cover English for academic purposes, second language writing, and academic discourse. Professor Ken Hyland is a well-known researcher in the field of applied linguistics and has published 35 books and over 280 papers with 87,000 citations on Google Scholar.
In the lecture, Professor Ken Hyland emphasized the importance of academic writing. He pointed out that authors should take responsibility for their writing and adhere to the characteristics of academic writing. Additionally, he stressed the role of academic literacy in shaping both disciplines and individuals. Professor Ken Hyland used corpus data and illustrative examples to demonstrate the variations in the utilization of first-person pronouns, citations, hedges, and boosters between soft and hard fields. Finally, he emphasized the significance of academic writing in establishing reputation, claiming that academic publication is integral to constructing academic identity and enhancing academic status, which plays a crucial role in researchers’ career development.
Professor Ken Hyland’s lecture was insightful, engaging, and interesting, by which the participants benefited substantially. In the Q&A session, students actively asked questions about ChatGPT and the writing motivation for non-English majors. This lecture is conducive to expanding the academic knowledge of teachers and students, improving their academic writing ability, stimulating their interest in academic research, and strengthening the academic research atmosphere of our school.
