ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The Department of English Language Teaching (DELT), Faculty of Arts, University of Jaffna, proudly presents its inaugural International Conference on Decolonizing English, scheduled to take place from August 11th to 13th, 2025. This ground-breaking event is designed to foster critical conversations about the role of English in postcolonial societies and to reimagine English Language Teaching (ELT) in ways that embrace local identities, knowledge systems, and cultural contexts.
About the Mentoring on Academic Publishing and Research
Keynote speakers
Prof. Alessia Cogo,
University of London, UK.
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Alessia Cogo is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Editor-in-Chief of ELT Journal. She supervises MA and PhD students in the areas of Global Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, translanguaging and the implications for language teaching. Her current projects focus on English and multilingual practices in professional, academic and migration contexts, with particular emphasis on inclusive practices and linguistic justice. She has worked on projects in Italy and Brazil and is currently working on a BC funded project concerning primary English language teaching in Thailand. She is the Director of the Centre for Multilingualism with English (CME).
Prof. Stephen May,
University of Auckland, New Zealand.
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Stephen May is a Professor in Te Puna Wānanga (School of Māori and Indigenous Education) in the Faculty of Education and Social Work and the Director of the cross-faculty and interdisciplinary Master of Regional Development program. He is an international authority on language rights, language policy, language revitalization, language education (especially, Indigenous, bilingual, and multilingual education), critical multiculturalism, and the "multilingual turn". To date, he has published 26 books and over 100 articles and chapters in these areas. Since 2022, he has been named in the top two percent of scientists globally in the fields of
linguistics and education in Stanford University's citation index (https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2022/10/28/arts-and-education-researchers-make-top-two-percent.html) H Index 54; I Index 122, with over 15,000 citations (Google Scholar, 24/08/2024)
Personal website: stephenamay.com Stephen was the Co-Chair of the New Zealand Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) Education Panel for the 2026 round until its dissolution by the current NZ government. He was the Deputy Chair of the PBRF Education Panel in the previous assessment cycle (2016-2019). He was the Social and
Behavioural Sciences Convenor for Te Apārangi/Royal Society of New Zealand from 2019-2022. He has also previously been Deputy Dean, responsible for Research (2012-2015) for the Faculty. From 2018- 2022, he was the Director of the University's Tai Tokerau campus, Te Papa Ako o Tai Tokerau, in Whangārei, Northland.
Plenary speakers
Prof. Harshana Rambukwella,
New York University Abu Dhabi.
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Harshana Rambukwella is a comparative literature and cultural studies scholar with an interest in the intersections between literature, history, aesthetics, and nationalism in South Asia. He is also a sociolinguist with interest in critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Rambukwella is the author of the Politics and Poetics of Authenticity (UCL Press 2018) and has published in journals such as boundary 2 and the Journal of Asian Studies and Interventions and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Rambukwella is currently working on a project on the 'cultural life of democracy,' looking at democracy in 'everyday life' as expressed in
cultural and aesthetic artifacts. This work is partly funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and he also serves as a Project Fellow on the Reversing the Gaze team — an interdisciplinary multi-sited project attempting to interrogate how insights from the postcolonial world can be usefully employed in the analysis of populism and anti-democratic thinking in Europe.
Prof. Dushyanthi Mendis,
University of Colombo.
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She is currently a Professor in English at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has a BA in English from the University of Peradeniya, an MA in Linguistics (TESOL) from Ohio University, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Michigan. Her research interests are the broad fields of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, academic English and Sri Lankan English(es). Her favoured approaches to the study of language are genre analysis and corpus linguistics.
Prof. Suresh Canagarajah,
Pennsylvania State
University, USA.
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Athelstan Suresh Canagarajah is a Tamil-born Sri Lankan linguist and currently an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied linguistics, English, and Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2007. His research covers World Englishes and teaching English to speakers of other languages. He has published works on translingualism , translanguaging , [1] linguistic imperialism, and social and political issues in language education. [3] His book, Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations, has won three nationally recognized best book awards.
Prof. GU, Ming Yue Michelle,
Education University of Hong Kong.
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Prior to joining EdUHK in 2018, Professor Michelle Gu Mingyue was Assistant
Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) from 2012 to
2017. As a researcher in sociolinguistics, Professor Gu explores the individual-context interplay mediated by languages and semiotics. Her research integrates theories and methods from sociolinguistics, critical inquiry, and discourse studies. She has developed theoretical frameworks to advance
the areas of multilingualism, language identity and ethical-self formation, second-language-learning motivation, and the interaction between language, culture and ethnicity.
Professor Gu is a prolific scholar with many publications in top academic journals of the fields of linguistics and languages. She is an active researcher with a strong record in securing external research grants such the General Research Grant (5 as PI; 5 as co-I), the PICO-Funded Public Policy Research, and the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research (research and development) projects (2 as PI; 3 as co-I). She has joined two World University Network projects and collaborated extensively with scholars across the world.
Professor Gu received the President’s Award in Individual Research Excellence in 2022 at EdUHK, the Research Excellence Award in 2017 and the Young Researcher Award in 2015 at CUHK. She is also listed among the
world’s top 2% most-cited scientists by Stanford University.
ICDE 2025 Flyer
Contact Info
Secretary,
ICDE,
Department of English Language Teaching,
Faculty of Arts,
University of Jaffna.