SALALS virtual conference 2021
21-23 September, 2021
The annual conference of the Southern African Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Society (SALALS), with participation by the South African Association of Language Teachers (SAALT), will be hosted in 2021 by the Department of General Linguistics at Stellenbosch University with support from the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR).
The Department of General Linguistics is honoured to be the host organiser this year as it is the 50+ anniversary celebration of the founding of the department – the Department opened its doors in 1970 and has overseen the linguistic education of many undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as producing innovative research over the last 50 years.
The conference will take place over Zoom and will consist of live-streamed pre-recorded presentations, followed by live virtual discussions. There will be various parallel paper sessions and the programme will be available shortly. The pre-recorded presentations will be hosted/archived on the online platform Open Science Framework (OSF).
Keynote presentations will take place live over Zoom. A Slack workspace will be created for participants to chat before, during, and after the live sessions. Virtual social events and society AGMs will also be scheduled on the programme.
Pre-recorded presentations will be provided with English captions/subtitles, while papers related to sign language linguistics will be interpreted into/from South African Sign Language (SASL). Live discussion sessions for papers in languages other than English will be accompanied by simultaneous interpreting into English. SASL interpreting will also be provided for select keynotes and papers.
See here for the 1st call for papers.
The conference will be preceded on Monday, 20 September, 2021 by two workshops hosted by SADiLaR: (i) an introduction to working with digital text, using Voyant tools and Regular expressions, where participants will gain new experience on how to analyse and read digital texts in an online environment, with no prior experience required; and (ii) an introduction to ELAN, where participants will gain experience in using ELAN to annotate video and audio recordings, again with no prior experience required. (See here for more information.)
Registration
Registration is now open and the extended deadline for presenter registration is 6 September. Registration for non-presenting participants remains open! The conference fee for the SALALS virtual 2021 conference is as follows (this fee includes membership of SALALS for 2021):
Student rate R250 (does not apply to students with tenured, faculty jobs)
Standard rate R700
Current paid-up members of SALALS qualify for a discount of the full conference fee. You will need to upload a proof of membership as part of registration. This can be obtained from the membership secretary, Ms Nina Brink (salalsmembership@gmail.com).
Programme
The first draft programme is now available. Zoom links for keynotes and paper sessions will be sent to registered participants closer to the time.
Keynote speakers
Prof Anne Baker (Stellenbosch University and the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Prof Leketi Makalela (University of the Witwatersrand)
Dr Katie Alcock (Lancaster University, UK)
Prof Theresa Biberauer (University of Cambridge, UK and Stellenbosch University)
Prof Panos Athanasopoulos (Lancaster University and Stellenbosch University)
