On July 11, 2025, SFS hosted an online session of its Foreign Language and Culture Forum, featuring two leading British scholars in corpus linguistics.

The forum invited Professor Paul Baker, Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences from Lancaster University, who delivered a keynote lecture titled A Picture is Worth 1000 Words? A Multimodal Investigation of an Image-Tagged Corpus. He was invited to join in discussion by Professor Tony McEnery, also a Fellow of the British Academy and a Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University, who serves as a visiting professor at XJTU.

Following its established format, the event included an interview, a thematic lecture, and a Q&A interaction.

During the interview, the two professors discussed topics such as applying corpus methods to social issues, data selection and interpretation, and the value of methodological triangulation. In the thematic lecture, Professor Baker shared the findings of a study on a multimodal annotated corpus based on the relationship between text and images. He highlighted how images and text co-construct meaning, noting that images in news reports can reinforce, challenge, or otherwise interact with textual information.

The Q&A session further explored the research value, technical constraints, and prospects of multimodal corpus studies.

As part of the High-Level International Expert Masterclass on Corpus Linguistics series, this forum offered valuable tools and insights for multimodal research, showcasing the application of multimodal corpora and demonstrating methods for analyzing text-image interaction.