ALC Newsletter - 08/01/2011 (Plain Text Version)
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45th Annual TESOL Convention and Exhibit REVIEW BY MATE-TESOL
Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans was, this year, the epicenter of the 45th Annual TESOL Convention and Exhibit held March 17-19, 2011. It is now history and can, with great pride, be recorded in the annals of TESOL as a successful educational professional event. Mitchell J. Landrieu, the mayor of the city, extended a warm welcome to all the attendees and encouraged everyone to fully enjoy everything New Orleans had to offer. We surely did, but the time of our stay was definitely too short to visit the majority of fine restaurants and music and entertainment venues. New Orleans, with its nickname, the “Crescent City,” is a city of neighborhoods; it is the city where people walk with an incredible zest. The attendees followed suit with gusto, by moving to and from the Convention Center and Hilton Hotel, either en masse or via shuttle to attend sessions; this boulevard hummed with traffic. Thumbing through the program book I brought back from the convention, I discovered the great variety of engaging professional presentations provided this year to challenge us to critically reflect on the current understanding and practices in the field of language learning and teaching. In addition, the large variety of topics covered content areas as diverse as content-based language instruction, intercultural communication, curriculum and materials development, discourse and pragmatics, personnel development, sociolinguistics and culture, and world Englishes. Academic Sessions and InterSections highlight topics of relevance to and across interest sections, providing a collaborative forum for attendees seeking innovative and cross-disciplinary approaches and solutions. There were a few seemingly insignificant innovations that caught my attention; I would like to share them with you. For example, this year, the TESOL Affiliate Booth was placed at a good vantage point, where it could readily be seen. Attendees could easily browse the affiliates’ newsletters and other educational products, including flyers advertising their conferences, symposia, and workshops. Also, did you notice the emergency information at the back of the badge, providing the name of a contact person and phone number in case of emergency? Also, this year the Exhibit Hall opened early on Wednesday, March 16; this was a wise decision, allowing TESOLers to have a global view of what the exhibit looked like and to prepare their purchase list accordingly. However, this year the perfect pandemonium of the Exhibit Hall did not exist. This is because fewer people visited the Exhibit Hall; one should admit, however, that the exhibitors showcased a lot of instructional professional items. They presented their latest teaching strategies, methodologies, resources, and curricula. In the Exhibitor Technology Pavilion, we experienced hands-on Web-based technology presentation by testing experts, interactive workshops, and demos. MATE-TESOL was well represented this year at TESOL. A seven-member delegation left Haiti on Tuesday, March 15, 2011, and arrived late in the afternoon in New Orleans. On Wednesday, March 16, at the Leadership Appreciation Luncheon, Comfort Davis Mingot, president-elect of MATE, received the TESOL Leadership Mentoring Program Award; on Thursday, March 16, at 1:00 p.m., Gertrude Tinker Sachs, Shelley Wong, Comfort Davis Mingot, and Herve F. Alcindor, and I developed the topic, “Earthquakes as Contexts for Critical Curricula Development Partnership in Haiti,” which was honored with the International Participation Award at TESOL. Following the afternoon plenary session on Thursday, I met Ahmar Mahboob, Convention Program Chair, and I said to him, “Congratulations! You did a great job.” “This is teamwork,” Ahmar said. “We all have a share in this success.” Immediately, I thought this is the kind of teamwork spirit all the affiliates need in order to succeed in their quest for excellence to provide their members with successful ongoing professional development workshops, symposia, and conferences. We also need committed leadership to move forward despite economic hardships and natural disasters. Above all, we need to strengthen the global professional networking that exists within TESOL, while broadening the diversity of members in our local/regional affiliates. Vive the “E” in TESOL! |
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