On May 18, the TKU Department of English held the Third Tamkang International Conference on Second Language Writing. Held at the Chueh Sheng International Conference Hall, the event commenced with an opening speech by the TKU President, Dr. Flora Chia-I Chang, in which she welcomed the international guests to the TKU Tamsui Campus. This was followed by a keynote speech from Mark Davies, a professor of corpus linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Brigham Young University, USA. In his speech, Prof. Davies described the applications of the Corpus of Contempory American English (COCA); demonstrated how to use COCA to assist in the task of academic writing; and introduced another very handy writing aid, the “Word and Phrase” website (www.wordandphrase.info).

Assistant Professor Hu Ying-Hsueh, from the TKU Department of English, noted that learning to write is an essential component of language learning. “Exploring effective methods of how to teach students about English writing is one of the key objectives of this conference”, she added.