English Studies 2025: Discourse and Society
International Student Conference
This conference aims to provide a platform for students to present and discuss their research in English Studies, focusing on the role of discourse in language, literature, and cultural representation. Objectives include fostering interdisciplinary conversations, bringing together students and scholars from various English Studies disciplines, and encouraging critical analyses of language impact on societal norms, values, and cultural narratives. To actively encourage student participation and engagement, the conference is offered free of charge.
Contributions are invited that align with but are not limited to the following thematic areas: linguistics (pragmatics, discourse analysis, media linguistics), literary studies (narratives and discourse in literature, postcolonial discourse, critical theory and discourse), cultural studies (discourse and culture, discourse and identity, representation in popular culture), cross-disciplinary approaches (intersections of language, literature, and culture; multimodal discourse analysis).
Speakers
Malachi Black
University of San Diego, USA
Łukasz Grabowski
University of Opole, Poland
Laura Vilkaitė-Lozdienė
Vilnius University, Lithuania
Kotryna Garanasvili
Vilnius University, Lithuania
Adlina Ariffin
International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia
Andreas Mahler
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Conference Programme
Adlina Ariffin
International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia
About the keynote speaker
↗️ Adlina Ariffin is a senior lecturer at the Department of English Language and Literature at the International Islamic University Malaysia. As a social scientist and linguist, she actively publishes and conducts research in social sciences, applied linguistics, language for specific purposes, digital humanities, and language and education.
↗️ Her current research interest involves investigating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) among university students in their academic writing. Students’ over-reliance on AI has disrupted the traditional landscape of the academe which has aggravated the issue of plagiarism. For this study, she has secured a national grant from the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education to carry out an analysis of the lexical features of human writing and AI writing and to identify their similarities and differences.
Keynote presentation Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Intelligence: A Comparative Analysis
↗️ The launch of AI chatbot technology such as ChatGPT and the like has garnered huge attention worldwide including the academe. Most importantly, the AI technology has aggravated the issue of plagiarism in the academia due to its capabilities to generate impressive written texts. Suddenly the academia is stormed with concerns on the authenticity of students’ written work since they could easily produce ‘professional’ and ‘convincing’ pieces by simply utilising the Chatbot. Consequently, there have been reports that some higher learning institutions are planning to revert to ‘pen-and-paper’ examination due to this concern. Meanwhile, a few countries have banned the usage of ChatGPT over concerns of plagiarism and misinformation in schools and universities. In addressing this plagiarism issue, instead of utilising the common plagiarism detecting tools, this study is proposing a different approach which is by utilising the writers’ own written texts. For such purpose, a comparative analysis had been conducted on the lexical features of human written texts and AI written texts. During the talk, audience will be enlightened on the study, results and important implications of such findings.
