Keynote Speakers
Dr. Steven Pinker (Friday, October 12, 2012)
Steven Pinker asks audacious questions about the human mind -- then boldly sets out to answer them. Recently named one of TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World, he is enormously popular in the media and highly respected in scientific circles. One of the world's leading cognitive scientists, Pinker translates his groundbreaking research into articles and books that are accessible to the general reader. His books include The Blank Slate and How The Mind Works, both bestsellers, and both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. His acclaimed "language" series includes The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
A native of Montreal, Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and has also taught at Stanford and, for 21 years, at MIT. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has won a number of teaching prizes, and his work is recognized around the world. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has received numerous awards, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Michael McCarthy (Saturday, October 13)
Michael McCarthy is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham, UK, Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick, Ireland and Visiting Professor in Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. He is author/co-author/editor of more than 40 books (including Touchstone, the Cambridge Grammar of English, English Grammar Today, Grammar for Business, From Corpus to Classroom and several titles in The English Vocabulary in Use series) and more than 80 academic papers. He is co-director (with Ronald Carter) of the 5-million word CANCODE spoken English corpus project, and the one-million word CANBEC spoken business English corpus. His current research involves the creation and analysis of spoken learner corpora in connection with the English Profile project. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has lectured on language and language teaching in 40 countries and has been actively involved in language teaching and applied linguistics for 46 years.
Graduate Students Symposium Keynote
Penny Ur (Thursday, October 11, 2012)
Penny Ur was educated at Oxford, where she read Hebrew and Arabic, and at Cambridge (PGCE). She completed her MA TEFL at Reading University in 1987.
Penny Ur has thirty-five years' experience as an English teacher in elementary, middle and high schools in Israel. From 1980 she has also been teaching BA and MA courses at Oranim Academic College of Education and Haifa University. She has presented papers at TESOL, IATEFL and other English teachers' conferences worldwide.
She has published a number of articles, and was for ten years the editor of the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series. Her books include Discussions that Work (1981), Five Minute Activities (co authored with Andrew Wright) (1992), Grammar Practice Activities (2nd Edition) (2009), Vocabulary activities (2012), A Course in English Language Teaching (2012), all published by Cambridge University Press.