From March 27 to 29, 2025, Prof. Tony McEnery, Fellow of the British Academy, Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University, and a high-level senior foreign expert of XJTU, visited SFS. During his visit, he held in-depth discussions on future collaborations, delivered a special lecture for SFS faculty and students, and engaged in multiple face-to-face exchanges with professors, master’s and doctoral students.
On the morning of March 28, Prof. McEnery met with Chen Xiangjing, Dean of SFS; Li Ying, Vice Dean; Peng Fengling, Director of the English Department; and faculty representative Li Yingyu. Both sides highly affirmed the achievements of previous collaborations and explored in detail international exchange programs, professional teaching cooperation, research collaboration, and disciplinary influence enhancement. Prof. McEnery provided specific suggestions on current challenges and identified future cooperation opportunities. Both parties agreed to seize opportunities to deepen collaboration.
On the afternoon, Prof. Tony McEnery was invited to Lecture 274 of the Foreign Languages and Culture Forum and Lecture 27 of the International Expert Masterclass Series, where he delivered a lecture titled “Learner Language, Discourse and Interaction”. Over 50 participants joined online and offline.
Prof. McEnery explored discourse construction patterns between native and second language speakers across task-based scenarios through corpus linguistics, demonstrating the efficacy of Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) in revealing how speech turns—far from being linear structures— exhibit complex dynamics shaped by multiple variables. His research established that MDA not only identifies structural divergences between native and second language discourse but also reflects competency gaps, enabling accurate evaluation of second language speakers' communicative abilities. This approach provides a novel analytical framework for second language acquisition research while informing more effective second language oral pedagogy. Professor McEnery further emphasized dynamic language evolution through multivariate analytical depth.
During the Q&A session, attendees discussed corpus construction, methodology, research objectives, topic selection, data ethics, variable control, and corpus scaling in the digital era.
From March 27 to 29, Prof. McEnery participated in multiple academic activities, discussing topics including early Chinese newspaper language, diachronic changes in Chinese function words, documentary literature translation, and classification model training, offering valuable insights to students and teachers.
With a packed schedule, Prof. McEnery’s visit advanced discussions on short- and long-term collaborations, yielding significant progress in research, disciplinary construction, and joint education.
