On December 1, The Fourth Seminar on Ecolinguistics was held in the lecture hall of the School of Foreign Studies. Teachers and students from Sun Yat-sen University, South China University of Technology, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Hunan Agricultural University and other universities in and outside the province participated in the workshop. Dean Huang Guowen, Deputy Dean Chen Yang, and Deputy Dean Du Longding extended warm welcome to the attendees.

           The speakers were Professor Sune Vork Steffensen, Director of the Center of Human Interaction of the University of Southern Denmark, Editor-in-Chief of Language Sciences–Elsevier, Professor Stephen Cowley of the University of Southern Denmark, and Professor Huang Guowen, Distinguished Professor of the Yangtze River Scholars of the Ministry of Education. With the theme of Ecological Civilization Construction and Ecological Discourse Research in the Chinese Context, three academic lectures were held.

Professor Huang Guowen elaborated on the framework of Harmonious Discourse Analysis, a new model of ecological discourse research based on China's national conditions and with Chinese characteristics. He combed the evolution of discourse analysis research, discussed the necessity of proposing a harmonious discourse analysis model, and conducted an in-depth study of the harmonious discourse analysis framework from the aspects of research goals and principles, theoretical guidance, research methods, research objects, etc..

          Professor Steffensen outlined the origin of ecolinguistics and four main research directions. He questioned the language view held by the current major schools of ecolinguistic research, and believed that the distributed language perspective was more reasonable. On this basis, he proposed his Radical Ecolinguistics.

Professor Cowley discussed the relationship between speech act and the construction of ecological civilization. He believed that the construction of ecological civilization should first accurately recognize ecological problems, but modern science had over-rendered its cognitive ability to the world and could not replace the world to think. Professor Cowley believed that Radical Ecolinguistics extended the focus of research from textual knowledge to enhancing the awareness of biological ecology, thus making Radical Ecolinguistics a goal that allowed humans to think in place of the world.

The lectures by the three experts greatly inspired the teachers and students present. In the interactive session after the lectures, the attendees discussed with the experts on ecolinguistic research methods and the application of ecolinguistics in foreign language teaching.

The ecolinguistics seminar series was initiated by Professor Huang Guowen, and this was the fourth one. The purpose is to train young ecolinguistics scholars, expand the academic impact of ecolinguistics, explore ecology and language, language use, and language education from multiple dimensions and levels, and promote the research and development of ecolinguistics in China. The ecolinguistics seminars have become a brand project of SFS.

                                                                                                                                                        (Report by Qin Jianhua   Pictures by Long Xiang)