99 NANJING“SINO-AUSTRALIAN ACADEMIC SYMPOSIUM ON NATURAL MEDICINE”

A Sino-Australian Academic Symposium of Natural Medicine,sponsored by China Society of TraditionalChinese Medicine and Pharmacy,assisted by Australian National Federation of Traditional Chinese Medicine,Pharmacy and Acupuncture Societies,and undertaken by Nanjing Society of Natural Medicine,will be held inNanjing,China on December 2-4 1999.Contents of solicited papers1.Theoretical research of natural medicine1)Meaning and contents of natural medicine;2)Origin development and prospects of natural medicine;3)Characteristics of natural medicine;4)Relation between natural medicine and human body science;5)and Culturalbackground and philosophical thinking of natural medicine.2.Exchange of experience in natural

Academic Symposium on China's Human Rights Development

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 30th anniversary of China＇ s reform and opening up, the China Society for Human Rights Studies （CSHRS） held an academic symposium named China＇s Thirty Years of Reform and Opening up and Human Rights Development, on December 2-3, 2008 in Beijing. Attending were Wang Chen, deputy head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China （CPC） Central Committee and director of the State Council Information Office, and Luo Haocai, president of the CSHRS. Both spoke at the symposium, which gathered some 60 human rights experts from all over China.

A Summary of the Academic Symposium on the Treatment and Management of City Wastes

With the continuous worsening of theproblems of urban wastes about 60 urbanscientific workers gathered in Guiyang to dis-cuss the present state of the treatment andmanagement of urban wastes and find rela-tive solutions to the problems.The“Guiyang Symposium on the Treat-ment and Management of City Wastes”jointly sponsored by the Chinese Urban Sci-entific Research Institute,the Urban Con-struction Department of the Ministry of Ur-

Appraisal of the Production-Oriented Approach： An Introduction

The production-oriented approach （POA） has been developed over a decade. It is driven by the need to improve English classroom instruction for university students in China （Wen, 2016）. It is also motivated by the aspiration to enhance the quality of foreign language education in other similar pedagogical contexts outside China. A volume of research has been done by Wen Qiufang and her research team, to formulate the theory of POA and to test its effectiveness in classroom pedagogy （e.g. Wen, 2016, 2015; Yang, 2015; Zhang, 2015）. At the moment, the POA is still at an early stage of theory building and almost all empirical research is done in the Chinese context. In order to improve the quality of this theory and to make it intelligible to the international academic community, a one-day symposium was held in Beijing Foreign Studies University on May 15, 2017. The symposium was entitled ＇The first international forum on innovative foreign language education in China： Appraisal of the POA＇. In the forum, leading experts in applied linguistics were invited to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the POA and the directions for its future development. The symposium was the first attempt for the POA research team to discuss its latest work with international scholars. This Viewpoint section collects the responses of four experts who participated in the symposium, listed in alphabetical order. The collection of articles covers three topics related to the POA： its pedagogical application, its use for teacher training, and its research. Alister Cumming is Professor Emeritus and the former Head of the Centre for Educational Research on Languages and Literacies, University of Toronto, Canada. His article focuses primarily on POA research as an exemplary case of design-based research. Rod Ellis is Research Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia. He discusses POA in terms of pedagogy, teacher training and research, with both critiques and constructive suggestions. Paul Kei Matsuda is Professor of English and Director of Second Language Writing at Arizona State University, the writed states. He responds to POA from the perspective of an expert researcher and teacher of L2 writing. Charlene Polio is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Linguistics ＆ Germanic, Slavic, Asian ＆ African Languages atMichigan State University, the writed states. She conceptualises POA as a useful method to address some issues in pre-service teacher development. Overall, the articles in this section are insightful and reader-friendly. They are not only useful for the development of POA in particular, but may also be valuable to a broad range of researchers as they touch upon pertaining issues, as well as emerging topics, in the field of applied linguistics. We therefore find it necessary to make them accessible to a wide readership.