On November 3, the third seminar onecolinguistics was held in Room 402 of School of Foreign Studies with the themeof “Ecolinguistics: Roots and Developments”. The invited guests were ProfessorSune Vork Steffensen and Professor Stephen Cowley from the University ofSouthern Denmark as well as Professor Huang Guowen, Dean of the School ofForeign Studies. Vice President Prof. Yang Zhou, Party Secretary of the Schoolof Foreign Studies Prof. Chen Wenyi and over 100 teachers and students fromHong Kong and universities inside mainland China attended the seminar.

   Vice President of SCAU Prof. Yang Zhou delivered a welcome addressand introduced SCAU.

Prof. Cowley gave two lectures entitled“History, theconcept of xu (续) and its place in discourse” and “Perception,action & analysis as genre”, in which he introduced the history of ecolinguistics against theWestern view that only humans could think on behalf of the living world andproposes a practical agenda. He also stressed the importance of developing newtext-types or genres in order to open up new ways of doing things withdiscourse and raise bio-ecological awareness.

   Prof. Steffensen gave two lectures entitled “Discoursebeyond structures: introducing Dialectical Ecolinguistics” and “Radicalecolinguistics and its implications for psychology, spirituality, ethics, andsociety”, in which he introduced the basics and central tenets ofdialectical ecolinguistics, put forward the Extended Ecology Hypothesis anddiscussed the psychological, spiritual , ethical as well as societalimplications of radical ecolinguistics.

   Prof. Steffensen and Prof. Cowley had dialogues centering on theroots, developments, scope, theoretical groundings, methodologies andapplications of ecolinguistics.

   Prof. Huang Guowen summarized the seminar by pointing out his own perspective,questions to be kept in mind as well as his hope for international cooperationfrom the international community, scholars, colleagues and friends etc. He alsoencouraged young scholars to join in ecolinguistic research.

Prof. Chen Yang hosted the closing ceremony.