The Eighth 21st Century International Forum on English Language Teaching was held in Fuxuan Hotel on April 11th, 2009. It was organized by 21st Century Newspapers of China Daily, TESOL, University of Arizona, and ECNU.
The theme of the forum is “Evaluation of Public Speaking”. The forum features lectures on public speaking given by experts from the major media and international English teaching and examination organizations. With the 2010 Shanghai World Expo just around the corner, we hope this forum will provide public speaking lovers and teachers with a platform to communicate with experts on public speaking.
As one of the organizers, dean of School of Foreign Languages, Professor Zhang Chunbai, and its vice dean, Professor Jin Hengshan made the welcome remarks. Director of Oral English Teaching and Research Centre at ECNU, Associate Professor Liu Sen, and Professor and Head of English Department of University of Arizona, presided over the forum.
Over the past 7 years, the forum has gradually grown into an annual festival for sharing the most up-to-date information in English language teaching. Speakers at the forum include experts from TESOL, The University of Arizona, ETS, BBC, ACL, universities in China, and previous “21st Century Cup” champions and their tutors. During the forum, Stephen Lucas, professor of Communication Arts and Evjue-Bascom professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, made a keynote speech titled “Secrets of a Winning Speech”. Daniel Tumposky, Assessment Director of ETS talked about “Scoring Oral Assessments: Developing and Maintaining Quality and Best Practices”. William Kremer, a scholar from China Team of BBC Learning English, also gave us a featured speech titled “Finding Your Funny Bone; Humor and Public Speaking”.
