Greetings everyone!

In this issue (31.1) I am pleased to feature articles by presenters at Boston TESOL's Applied Linguistics Interest Section and Intercultural Communication's InterSection entitled "From Conversation Analysis to Language Learning." One of the main purposes of the panel was to make a clear connection between conversation analysis research and language learning in the classroom. As the presenters state, pedagogy is much more effective if it is based on strong research. Conversation analysis research can uncover classroom behavior that has heretofore escaped the notice of researchers and practitioners. The members of this panel are constantly working toward constructing this bridge between conversation analysis and the classroom. In that effort, they have presented every year at TESOL since 2007, and each year there seems to be a steady increase in interest in this research methodology.

Donna Fujimoto's article provides a brief introduction to conversation analysis (CA) and then shows how CA can be used to understand how novice language learners express agreement and disagreement in small-group discussion. Noël Houck's article examines linguistic and interactional features that underlie conversational competence of learners of English. The author concludes with challenges teachers and learners alike face in developing interactional competence. David Olsher's single case analysis focuses on a small-group interaction: brainstorming. He uses CA to report on recurrent practices, actions, and turn structures the speakers exploit repeatedly in the process of brainstorming a list of adjectives. The final article in this issue by Jean Wong and Hansun Waring illustrates the use of CA to help understand pragmatics in language. They look at interactional practices for talk-in-interaction such as disagreement, invitation/offer, and request sequences. They conclude with how CA can offer learners a more specific, more situated, and more complex picture of how language works. Thank you to the authors for their contributions.

I have enjoyed bringing the ALIS Forum to you but it is time to say goodbye. I know the ALIS Forum will continue to produce interesting and thought-provoking pieces as we welcome Jana Moore and Olga Griswold as the new coeditors of ALIS Forum. I hope to see everyone at TESOL in New Orleans, March 16-20!

Priyanvada Abeywickrama