From January 23-27, 2023 the Center for Applied Linguistics (CLA) hosted the 18th International Symposium on Social Communication at the emblematic Heredia Cultural Center in the heroic city of Santiago de Cuba under the auspice of the Provincial Chapter of the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists, the University of Oriente, and other higher education institutions from Spain, Austria, Denmark, Italy, Chile and Germany.
Experts from Cuban and other nine countries attended the conference and participated in academic sessions, namely, Linguistics, Foreign Languages, Mass Media, and Education and Communication. A total of 58 papers were presented.
On January 23, two pre-symposium courses were taught: Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts by Dr. Izaskun Etxeberria from the University of the Basque Country and School Textbook and Coherence Relationships: Theory, Methods and Implications by Dr. Romualdo Ibáñez Orellana and Dr. Andrea Santana Covarrubias from the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso.
On January 24, 25 and 26, three plenary keynote addresses were presented: Creation of the Mexican Spanish Dictionary: the experience by Dr. Luis Fernando Lara (El Colegio de México); Augmented Reality: Perceiving and Experiencing What Possibly Cannot Be Real (Although It May Be Humoristic) by Dr. Anton Nijholt (University of Twente, The Netherlands); and Folklore and Social Vocabulary in Guillén’s Poetry by Dr. Leonel Ruiz Miyares (Center for Applied Linguistics, Cuba), respectively.
Numerous topics relating to communication were discussed during academic sessions from the perspective of teaching, journalism, computing and the use of new technologies, and linguistics in general. Minda López and Angelika Benavidez (USA) presented Funds of identity and education: the journey of a Latina educator from linguistic erasure to linguistic empowerment, which opened an intense debate on how to improve the teaching process with new didactic proposals building learners’ skills. In addition, Cuban researcher Denisys Pérez Hernández in her presentation Critical analysis of journalistic discourse in The Washington Post on mass espionage examined the presence and absence of discursive principles in the journalistic writing of this media outlet. Likewise, present-day topics were covered including a study conducted by Cuban researcher Eduardo Pinto Sánchez that gives emphasis to semiotic analysis of memes structure from a feminist approach by contrasting their components in order to give meaning to the whole image. (02/01/2023)