Friday 1st - Sunday 3rd June 2012
The annual conference of the Association of French Language Studies (AFLS) will be
held at Newcastle University from Friday 1st to Sunday 3rd June 2012. The
conference acts as a forum to encourage and promote language teaching activities and
research in French linguistics in Higher Education. The theme of this year’s conference
is « le français à travers le temps: acquisition, changement et variation ».
The AFLS 2012 organising committee welcomes abstract submissions for both papers
and posters on any aspect of French language studies. They may be in English or
French from either postgraduate students or academic staff and focus on any variety of
French, or French-based pidgins and creoles, from any period in time.
Please continue to check this site for updates and further information about the
forthcoming conference. Alternatively, you could follow us on Twitter @AFLS2012.
Important Dates
Abstract submission opens:
Monday 11th September 2011
Deadline for abstract submission: Saturday 14th January 2012
Notification of acceptance:
Registration opens:
from Friday 17th February 2012
Monday 20th February 2012
Late registration opens:
Saturday 28th April 2012
AFLS 2012 conference:
Friday 1st - Sunday 3rd June 2012
Registration fees (available from Monday 20th February to Friday 27th April)
AFLS Member: £170
Student and Unwaged AFLS Member: £130
Standard (non-AFLS Member): £210
Standard (non-AFLS Member) Student and Unwaged: £170
Late Registration (from Saturday 28th April)
AFLS Member: £200
Student and Unwaged AFLS Member: £160
Standard (non-AFLS Member): £240
Standard (non-AFLS Member) Student and Unwaged: £200
The registration fee includes lunches during the conference (x3), tea and coffee breaks
throughout the conference, conference pack and a reception event held on the Friday
evening.
The conference dinner is an optional extra at a cost of £30 (excluding drinks) and will
take place on the Saturday evening.
Call for Papers
This conference, as the annual meeting of the Association for French Language Studies,
is open to the whole range of French language studies. This includes French linguistics
and French language teaching in Higher Education. This year, we invite in particular
papers which address change in representation or usage in connection with the French
language. Change in representation can occur in the individual, in first and second
language acquisition, whether in natural or classroom settings. Change in representation
can equally occur in the language community: in diachrony as well as in connection to
language variation across space, society, and style.
Papers and posters are invited on any aspect of French language studies, in particular
first and second language acquisition, diachronic change, language structure, language
variation and language teaching. Contributions may be in English or French and focus
on any variety of French, or French-based pidgins and creoles, from any period in time.
We aim to gather an international community of French language researchers and thus
get a sense of where the field as a whole is going. Contributions are welcome from both
established and junior researchers, including postgraduate students.
Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words (excluding title and references) and
should be submitted via the Linguist List EasyAbs portal by Saturday 14th January
2012. We are only accepting electronic submissions in .doc, .odt and .pdf formats.
Abstracts will also be anonymously reviewed, so author names and affiliation should not
appear anywhere on abstracts. They must also be written in the language of delivery.
Oral presentations at AFLS 2012 will be 20-minute papers with 10 minutes for audience
questions and discussion. Posters will be presented during dedicated sessions, with
each author being assigned an A0 size (841 x 1189mm) landscape space to display
their work.
All abstracts conforming to the above guidelines will be reviewed anonymously. The pool
of reviewers comprises the AFLS executive and the local organising committee. Once
the review process is complete, we will notify you whether your paper has been
accepted, and if yes, for an oral or poster presentation.
For a downloadable version, please click on the following link: AFLS 2012 Call for
Papers.pdf
Plenary Speakers
The organising committee are delighted to announce that the plenary speakers for
AFLS2012 will be: Jim Coleman, Marie-Hélène Côté, Jean-Marc Dewaele, Ruth King
and Sophie Prévost.
Please click on plenary speaker’s name below to view their webpage and the title of their
AFLS 2012 plenary address to access their abstract.
Jim Coleman (Open University)
Ruth King (York University)
Sophie Prévost (CNRS/ENS Paris)
Ruth King is Professor of Linguistics at York University (Toronto). Her research deals
with patterns of language variation and change. She has spent a lot of her career
working on the grammatical structure of Atlantic Canadian Acadian French and related
French varieties. She also works on general language issues around language change,
including the process by which language contact leads to linguistic change. She is the
author of three books, Talking Gender (1991), The Lexical Basis of Grammatical
Borrowing (2000) and Acadian French in Time and Space (to appear). Her articles have
appeared in many journals, including Language, Probus, Language Variation and
Change, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, Journal of French Language
Studies and Discourse & Society.
Jim Coleman, Professor of Language Learning and Teaching a the UK’s Open
University, is a founder member of the AFLS, former committee member, and editor of
the AFLS series Current Issues in University Language Teaching, which saw 13
volumes published between 1992 and 2001. He has co-authored French language
courses for use in universities, and published on French literature and area studies
before concentrating his research on university language learning and teaching. He
chairs the Open University’s beginners’ French course Bon départ. In 2011, he was
elected Chair of the University Council of Modern Languages, and became editor of
System: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics.
Sophie Prévost is a senior researcher in the LaTTiCE (Langues, Textes, Traitement
Informatique, Cognition) research lab, based at the CNRS and the ENS Paris. She
works on medieval French from a diachronic perspective. Her main research interests
are discourse structure, word order (syntax of the subject, amongst others) and
grammaticalisation. She is furthermore very active in corpus linguistics research and
contributes to morphosyntactic and syntactic coding of medieval texts. At Paris-7, she
teaches a research seminar on diachrony and grammaticalisation. In July 2011, she was
awarded a habilitation at ENS Lyon.
The AFLS 2012 organising committee consists of the following members: Richard
Waltereit (General Co-ordinator), Lucy Brickwood, Caroline Cordier, SJ Hannahs, Jo
Lumley, Jean-Christophe Penet, Nicholas Roberts, Sandra Salin and Marie-Claude
Tremblay.