Hosted by the Polish Studies Center and the School of International Studies of NingboTech University, as well as the Department of Chinese Studies and Confucius Institute of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and co-organized by the School of Foreign Languages of Ningbo University of Technology, the School of Humanities of Ningbo University of Finance and Economics, the two-day international academic seminar “China-Poland and Other Central and Eastern European Countries Language and Culture Studies: Significance and Prospects” was wrapped up on April 16th, attracting active online and offline participation.

Addressing the opening ceremony which was co-officiated at by HU Haipeng, Deputy Director of the Polish Studies Center, NingboTech, and Tomasz Wicherkiewicz, deputy head of the Department of Oriental Studies of the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures, Adam Mickiewicz, ZHANG Xianmin, Vice President of NingboTech, welcomed all the attendees and hoped that activities of this kind could be held on a regular basis to promote the construction of academic research platforms and in-depth exchanges between Chinese and CEE countries.

The conference focuses on the significance and prospects of China-Poland and other CEE countries language and culture studies. Six experts shared with the attendees their latest research results in their key-note speeches. Katarzyna Klessa, professor specializing in corpus-based linguistics of Adam Mickiewicz, introduced major projects currently undertaken by the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures, like InNet-Innovative Networking in Infrastructure for Endangered Languages and Poland’s Linguistic Heritage. CHANG Hui, professor of second language acquisition of the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, noted that adult L2 learners might rely on both lexical-semantic and pragmatic information in sentence processing in his speech entitled “Processing of Mandarin Base-Generated Topic Sentences by Korean Learners of Chinese: Evidence from an Eye-tracking Experiment”. Maria Kurpaska, expert in Oriental studies of Adam Mickiewicz University, compared the situation of dialects in Poland and in China, the language policy, and people’s attitudes towards the language varieties. Prof. WANG Xiaolu, expert in cognitive neurolinguistics, investigated how Chinese logogriphs are comprehended by learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) with different Chinese proficiencies and cultural backgrounds. Dr. Joanna Krenz of Adam Mickiewicz pointed out that Polish and Chinese poetry genres are worlds apart in many ways, and made suggestions as to how to strengthen cross-cultural dialogues between Chinese and Polish poetry. WANG Zhiguang, expert in translation of Zhejiang University, proposed that Polish literary works should be introduced to China via their English versions, which was greeted enthusiastically by the Polish experts present. Eight more scholars presented their research findings in areas like cross-cultural communication and language teaching during the panel sessions.

The seminar is another milestone in the six-year cooperation between NingboTech and Adam Mickiewicz.