From August 21 to 23, the 8th International Symposium on Teaching English at Tertiary Level & the 17th International Conference of PAAL was held in Beijing. The symposium was co-hosted by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (DFLL), Tsinghua University, and the English Department of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Professor Yuan Si, vice president of Tsinghua University, attended the opening ceremony and addressed the audience, and speakers included Professor Liu Shisheng, vice dean of the School of Humanities and chair of DFLL, Christian Matthiessen, dean of the English Department of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Ho Han, chairman of PAAL. The opening ceremony was chaired by Professor Lv Zhongshe, vice chair of DFLL.

After the opening ceremony, Rod Ellis, expert researcher on second language acquisition (SLA) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, delivered a keynote speech entitledTheoretical Pluralism in SLA: Is there a way forward?In the speech, he compared cognitive SLA with social cultural SLA in details, thereby approaching the issue of optimal paradigm to follow for current research concerning SLA.

More than 100 scholars were invited to the symposium, including over 50 from other countries (like Japan, Korea, the United States, New Zealand and Australia), 20 from Hong Kong and others from universities in the mainland. The symposium is closely related with English teaching, covering topics like academic English teaching, curriculum offering, teaching materials development, evaluation system, computer-aided language learning (CALL), learning strategies, language policy, research on literature and translation, applied corpus linguistics and Asian English.