Professor Kaibao HU received his Master's degree in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1991,
and obtained his Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Nanjing University in 2004.
He has held academic and administrative positions at the Department of Foreign Languages at Hefei University of Technology,
the School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
and the Institute of Language Sciences at Shanghai International Studies University.
Over the years, he has served as Associate Professor, Professor,
and has successively held the positions of Associate Dean, Executive Dean, and Dean.
He is the Editor-in-Chief of Corpus-based Studies across Humanities and member of editorial board of Corpora, and serves as the series editor for Frontiers in Applied Linguistics (Routledge), Corpora and Intercultural Studies (Springer), and Corpus-based Translation Studies Series (Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press).
Professor Hu was awarded the Second Prize of the Shanghai Municipal Higher Education Teaching Achievement Award in 2014, the Third Prize and the Second Prize of the Ministry of Education Award for Outstanding Achievements in Humanities and Social Sciences in Higher Education in 2015 and 2024.
He was listed among the Most Influential Scholars in Chinese Philosophy and Social Sciences in both 2017 and 2020, and has been selected as a Distinguished Professor under the National High-Level Talent Program.
Professor Hu has long been engaged in corpus-based translation studies.
He has published over 120 research articles in prestigious domestic and international journals,including those indexed by SSCI, A&HCI, and CSSCI.
He is the author of ten academic monographs published by leading publishers such as Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and Higher Education Press.
He has led 25 research projects, including majoral projects funded by the National Social Science Fund of China, and key projects commissioned by the China Academy of Translation. The total research funding he has secured exceeds 15 million RMB.
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Dr. Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin is the Administrative Board Member of the Association of the Thailand Professional and Organizational Development Network (www.thailandpod.org), the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research, and Innovation-MHESI. She is a member of the Academic Committee (Humanities) of the National Research Council of Thailand-NRCT, and the advisor of the Burapha University Language Institute. She was the Assistant to the President for Research and International Affairs at Chulalongkorn University from 2004 to 2008. She was also the former Chairperson of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, where she has been teaching there for more than forty years. At Chulalongkorn University she was the advisor of the Centre of Excellence for Research in Speech and Language Processing-CRSLP (www.crslp.chula.ac.th), and the advisor and senior expert member of the International Graduate Program in English as an International Language (www.eil.grad.chula.ac.th), where she was the first director of both sectors for many years. Dr. Sudaporn is an expert in speech computing and speech technology, the area that she has been doing research from the 70s while she was a Ph.D. student in Theoretical Phonetics at the Department of Linguistics, and a postdoctoral fellow in Speech Computing and Speech Technology at the Centre for Research in Speech Technology-CSTR in the 80s, the University of Edinburgh, the United Kingdom. Her expertise extended from general phonetics to psycholinguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and applied linguistics. Working with computer processing of language and speech, she extends her interest into human processing of language and speech. She has collaborated with colleagues in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Ireland, Sweden, Belgium, and Finland in applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and speech and language processing. She has been invited as visiting professors and honorary researchers to universities in Thailand and in different countries where she also co-supervised Ph.D. students. Her research in speech technology is the first Thai Text-to-Speech System-TTS and Thai Automatic Speech Recognition System-TASR which are the prototype of various Thai speech engines developed later either by herself and the team, or by her former students. Her work with the business partners is the IBM (Home Page Reader), the AWR System with Sun Systems, the TTS and ASR system with Nuance. She also worked with Nokia (Finland) in the development of Corpus Based Thai Lexicon. Another area of her expertise is applied linguistics. She supported the Ministry of Education for almost 30 years on the national curriculum development, chairing the three main National English Language Curriculum Development Committees (the 1996 National English Curriculum, the 1999 Standards and Benchmarks for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, and the 2009 National Core Curriculum for English). Dr. Sudaporn has more than 100 published papers. She has supervised more than 100 M.A., M.Sc., M. Eng, and Ph.D. research projects at Chulalongkorn University and other universities both in Thailand and other countries. On 2 October 2024 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Arts from Chulalongkorn University, a great honour of her career achievements. A full resume can be accessed at the websites of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. Her h-index score can be found in Semantic Scholar with 778 citations and 52 highly influential citations.
"Language as Cognitive Processes: A revisit for language teaching and learning"
In this hyperconnected world of the third decade of the twenty first century, Usage-Based language learning is what language educators need. The centre of the learning is communication within and across languages. The three aspects that are intertwined as cognitive processes for this type of learning are as follows: 1) World categorisation and words: how different languages categorise things and the world, comparing domains in different languages. 2) The emotive aspect: this seems to be universal. However, once expressed into languages, metaphorical expressions show how this emotive aspect is processed through expressions that are governed by the first aspect which is more language specific. 3) The human communication: when language is used in communication, this cognitive process is also governed by the interlocutors and the context of communication which includes the context of culture, the context of situation that takes the context of space (participants and place) and the context of time (absolute time or relative time or periods). These three aspects of cognitive processes would be reviewed and discussed how they are working holistically in communication and how this holistic approach should be applied for Usage-Based language teaching and learning.
Professor Meihua Liu is currently a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Between 2011 and 2012, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Professor Liu was a top-cited scholar in the field of Social Sciences in China from 2014 to 2022 and was recognised as one of the top 2% of linguists globally in 2023. Her research interests mainly include second language/ foreign language teaching and learning, individual differences (e.g., reticence and anxiety), English as a foreign language writing, and international education.
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Prof. Rustam Shadiev is a Tenured Professor at the College of Education, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, specializing in advanced learning technologies for language learning and cross-cultural education. He earned his Ph.D. in Network Learning Technology from National Central University in 2012. Prof. Shadiev is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He also serves as a Graduate Faculty Scholar in the College of Graduate Studies at the University of Central Florida, USA.
In 2019, Prof. Shadiev was honored with the title of Distinguished Professor of Jiangsu Province, China. He has published over 200 academic studies, with more than half appearing in journals indexed by the Social Sciences Citation Index. Additionally, he has been recognized as one of the most cited Chinese researchers in the field of education by Elsevier, Scopus, and Shanghai Ranking for four consecutive years, from 2020 to 2023.
Prof. Shadiev serves on the Editorial Board of several prestigious journals, including the Journal of Educational Technology & Society, the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, and Smart Learning Environments. He also guest edits special issues for various esteemed journals, such as the Journal of Educational Technology & Society, Sustainability, and Frontiers in Psychology.
Context Matters: Enhancing EFL Learning through Familiar and Unfamiliar Real-World Environments
This keynote explores the critical role of environmental familiarity in shaping learners’ performance and engagement in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Drawing upon theories of language input and output, cultural schema, and contextualized learning, the presentation examines how authentic environments, both familiar and unfamiliar, can influence the acquisition and application of language skills.
Grounded in empirical research, the talk presents findings from studies comparing EFL learners’ performance across familiar and unfamiliar real-world contexts. The results demonstrate the significant affordances of familiar environments, such as enhanced comprehension, meaningful engagement, and efficient learning. Furthermore, the speech highlights the impact of strategic familiarization approaches on learners’ ability to navigate and learn effectively in initially unfamiliar settings.
The keynote concludes with practical recommendations for integrating contextual familiarity into EFL instruction. It advocates for the use of mobile learning technologies and the deliberate design of learning tasks rooted in learners’ everyday environments to promote meaningful, sustained, and transferable language learning experiences.