Research

The School put in place its new administrative structures in the summer of 2000, and the newly-formed School Committees commenced functioning in the academic year 2000-2001, enabling a higher level of democratic participation in decision-making than had been possible hitherto. The new structures enabled the School to take on board the challenges faced by the University in relation to the general leveling off of student demand for undergraduate courses, including courses in languages. The School devoted considerable resources to strategic planning during this period and, by the end of the year, had identified key areas where development could take place, including the further development of courses in Intercultural Studies, the provision of further courses in English as a Foreign Language and the expansion of the provision of places in our postgraduate programmes, including in particular the Graduate Diploma/MA in Translation Studies.

The first cohort of students on the Intercultural Studies strand of the BA in Applied Languages graduated in autumn 2000, while the Graduate Diploma in Intercultural Studies, the first postgraduate diploma in this area in Ireland, took in its first students in the same period. These developments reflect the considerable effort put into this area by colleagues in SALIS since the mid-1990s, and build on activities such as the highly successful conference on 'Cultural Trauma and National Identity', organised in the School by the Centre for Intercultural Studies in spring 2000.

Research continued to be a key priority for the School, with numerous Publications, contributions to conferences and other activities. Noteworthy here is the School's record in continuing to publish single-author books. Among the books published by SALIS staff-members in this period were: Dorothy Kenny, Lexis and creativity in translation: a corpus-based study, St Jerome, 2001; Agnes Maillot, IRA: Les républicains irlandais (2nd edition), Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2001, and Mary Phelan, The interpreter's resource, Multilingual Matters, 2001.

In the course of 2001, several SALIS staff-members were involved in projects relating to the 'European Year of Languages-2001', aimed at raising awareness of the importance of learning foreign languages. SALIS participated in a major international project, organised by the University of Salamanca (Spain) and involving the Universities of Bergamo (Italy), Leuven (Belgium), Wurzburg (Germany), Salzburg (Austria), Coimbra (Portugal) and Portsmouth (UK). An art competition was organised by SALIS among primary-school children in Dublin and an essay competition among second-level children, both on the theme of language learning. The SALIS staff-members involved in this project collaborated with the other partner institutions in organising three international conferences on language learning during the year. They also offered papers at those conferences, as follows: Rosemary Graham and Bill Richardson at the University of Salamanca (July 2001), Margaret Gibbon at the University of Salzburg (October 2001) and Jean-Philippe Imbert at the University of Bergamo (November 2001).