1st Language Online Conference

This online conference brings together academics, researchers, educators and others from a wide variety of fields, for a collaborative, multidisciplinary exploration of the ways in which the pandemic has impacted online communication. Abstracts are peer-reviewed. Themes and issues for the conference include, but are not limited to:

Stream A: Language online

Papers are invited in any area of computer-aided language teaching and learning. How has the move online due to the pandemic impacted language teaching and learning? What are the benefits and potentials of the technical affordances? How may they be best combined with course platforms or other online resources? What are the difficulties, limitations and challenges for teachers and for students? How does online teaching and learning shape, and impact the role of paralinguistic communication? We welcome brain-imaging and similar studies exploring paralinguistic and kinesic elements of communication in online situations, as well as their integration with spoken and written language. We also welcome studies exploring how differently-abled communities are responding to the move online, examining varieties of socially constructed interpretive traditions, and presenting semiotic analyses of these elements of communication in contemporary media texts, including music and sound (other than voiced sounds), dance, light and colour.

Stream B: Applied linguistics online

Papers are invited in any area of applied linguistics in CALL contexts. This includes, but is not limited to: systemic functional linguistics in language pedagogy, any other area of language teaching and learning, language assessment, ESP, multiliteracies and multimodality, second language acquisition, language teacher education, stylistics, and language policy and planning, among many. We also welcome papers from related fields, with a focus on an applied linguistics area, such as semantics, discourse analysis, World Englishes, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, phonetics and phonology, among many. Papers may address issues connected to the pandemic, or not.

Stream C: Language and the online clinical context

Virtual doctors’ consultations have become a norm in recent years. The pandemic has made these even more a part of the way clinicians and practitioners provide care to their patients. We welcome papers on the potentials, and best practices, of virtual and online medicine, for handling the pandemic, and beyond. What are the challenges and difficulties? How do these vary by medical specialisation, by geographic region, and by human community? How has the internet enabled doctor-shopping and clinic-hopping? To what degree has the pandemic intensified the problems, and the promise, of the search engine as a form of medical consultation? How does online interaction change the quality of interactions? How do virtual interactions change the practitioner-patient relationship? What elements in remain face-to-face and what changes?