As an additional part of the conference, the Department of English Language Teaching, University of Jaffna, will hold a mentoring workshop on publishing in topics related to English, linguistics, and language teaching for scholars who might benefit from feedback on their works in progress. International experts on research and publishing will conduct sessions where participants’  manuscripts will be discussed and suggestions offered for submission to promising academic journals. It is expected that some of those participating in the conference will benefit from this more advanced professional development opportunity.

Faculty Experts

• Prof. Suresh Canagarajah, Pennsylvania State University, USA
• Prof. Stephen May, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
• Prof. Alessia Cogo, University of London, UK.
• Prof. Harshana Rambukwella, New York University, Abu Dhabi
• Prof. Dushyanthi Mendis, University of Colombo.
• Prof. GU, Ming Yue Michelle, Education University of Hong Kong.

Procedure:
Each participant will be expected to submit a manuscript they are drafting for publication ahead of the workshop. During the workshop, the participants will first briefly describe their research and the challenges they face in writing the paper. This will be followed by 30-45 minutes of discussion where the experts and other participants offer suggestions for improving the manuscript for a successful journal publication. Feedback will focus on: suitable journals for the manuscript; the guidelines of journals for preparing the manuscript; relevant recent scholarship and literature review that should be included; ways of strengthening the data analysis, findings, and discussion; and areas for improving style and grammar.

As this is a hand-on workshop, the number of participants will be kept small to facilitate detailed discussion and close interactions. Interested participants will send 600 word abstracts on or before 31st of March; accepted abstracts will be notified by 15th of April. Send full manuscripts on or before 1st of June: accepted manuscripts will be notified by 15th of June for registration for the workshop.

All the abstracts and manuscripts of the mentoring workshop should be sent to icde@univ.jfn.ac.lk . The workshop will be held in the Department of English Language Teaching, University of Jaffna, Thirunelvely, from 9am to 5pm on both days.