04–589Coulthard, Malcolm (Aston U., UK). Author indentification, idiolect, and linguistic uniqueness. Applied Linguistics (Oxford, UK), 25, 4 (2004), 431–447.

The National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education (NRCFLE) attached to Beijing Foreign Studies University (www.sinotefl.ac.cn/) is a key research institute in the humanities and social sciences in universities approved by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People's Republic of China. It was formally set up and approved in September 2000. After a decade of dedicated hard work, the centre has become an applied linguistics hub of research and training unrivalled in China, and co-hosted AILA2011, the 16th World Congress in Applied Linguistics in August 2011. The current director of the centre, WEN Qiufang, currently presides over the China English Language Education Association, another co-host of AILA2011. The centre publishes two journals, one of them, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, being pre-eminent in the field in every key journal index in China, as well as being the only journal in applied linguistics and foreign language education to feature in the MOE's 2010 Distinguished Journals in Humanities and Social Sciences.

This seminar was hosted by York St John University, UK, from 24–26 June 2015, and the co-ordinators were Chris Hall and Rachel Wicaksono (aided by Indu Meddegama, Clare Cunningham, Vicky Crawley, Ruth Ataçocuğu and Christian Sims). The seminar aimed to share diverse understandings of the ontological status of ‘English’ and to stimulate debate regarding the ways in which the language can be most effectively conceptualised for first language and second language learning, teaching and assessment. The seminar was organised around five sessions representing different frameworks. Following each session, an invited discussant highlighted major themes and led a general discussion. Individual papers are reported on below and the conclusion suggests their implications for applied linguistics.

Ever since Aristotle and Plato (The Categories; Cratylus), linguists have considered language to be the pairing of form (sounds or gestures or written strings) and meaning. This is true for all meaningful linguistic units from morphemes, through words, phrases and sentences, to discourse. Generally speaking, semantics is the study of how form and meaning are related. However, semantics is more narrowly construed as excluding those meanings that derive from speaker intensions and psychological states, as well as sociocultural features of the context. Furthermore, the boundary between semantics proper and pragmatics is intensely debated and to some researchers constitutes an empirical question. Formal semantics came into being as a system describing formal languages, that is, the mathematical and logical languages of computing machines as opposed to the natural languages of human beings. However, in the late 1960s the philosopher Richard Montague argued that natural languages such as English could be fruitfully described using the same rigorous rules and correspondences utilized in the description of formal languages. Modern formal semantics was born and is currently prospering as a branch of linguistics.

Presented at the Second Language Research Forum, Michigan State University, USA; 31 October 2009

Focus on form, i.e. brief attention to language items within a larger meaning-focused context (Long 1991; Ellis 2001), occurs in a variety of L2 instructional contexts. Meta-analyses of the effectiveness of focus on form have found overall positive effects; however, these meta-analyses have commented on the small number of studies available for synthetic analyses, particularly when considering the effects of specific characteristics of focus on form (e.g. Norris & Ortega 2001; Russell & Spada 2006; Mackey & Goo 2007). Consequently, this colloquium continued the investigation of specific focus on form variables to further our understanding of why ‘sometimes focus on form works, and sometimes it does not’ (Williams 2005: 685).