Greetings everyone,

Happy New Year and welcome to the latest edition of AL Forum (32.1). In this issue, we are pleased to present a sneak-peek preview of the events scheduled for the upcoming TESOL Convention in Philadelphia, four articles from two Academic Sessions that took place at TESOL 2011 in New Orleans, and our new exciting feature―Graduate Student Corner.

First, do not miss updates from our leadership. In his report, our chair, Dilin Liu, introduces two TESOL 2012 Academic Sessions. The Applied Linguistics IS is involved in the organization of both, one as a primary sponsor and the other as a cosponsor with the Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers (NNEST) IS. Both sessions promise to be extremely interesting, so make sure to read Dilin’s overview below. Our chair-elect, Kara Hunter, also provides a compelling preview of the panel that will be devoted to documentation styles and practices across languages and cultures―a topic we are certain many of our members will find valuable.

Next, everyone’s convention schedules tend to get busy, and if in New Orleans you had to miss two outstanding Academic Sessions―“Linguistic Issues in Writing from Sources” and “New Theories and Effective Practices in Teaching Vocabulary and Grammar”―be sure to check out the articles based on the presentations made at these two highly informative events.

In the opening article, Susan Olmstead-Wang discusses the challenges that emerging nonnative writers experience in the effective use of modal expressions when reporting prior research. She provides pedagogical suggestions that many L2 writing instructors will find useful.

The next three articles have a common theme: new linguistic theories and their applications in L2 pedagogy. First, Dilin Liu convincingly argues for the effective combination of corpus linguistics (CPL) and cognitive grammar (CGL) in the teaching of vocabulary and syntactic structure. He clearly demonstrates how CPL/CGL-based pedagogy can make learning lexicogrammar more appealing and meaningful to the students as well as efficient for the teachers.

Next, Eli Hinkel introduces the principles of construction grammar and discusses practical applications of this theoretical paradigm to teaching academic writing. Writing instructors working in educational contexts ranging from EFL courses to composition courses in English-medium schools and colleges that include multilingual students will find this article informative and useful.

The fourth feature article is Diane Larsen-Freeman’s highly illuminating look at language and the language-learning processes from the point of view of complexity theory. This essay provides a cogent and clear explanation of complexity theory and outlines the implications of viewing language as a complex adaptive system for both learning and teaching.

Last but not least, we proudly present our first submission to the new Graduate Student Corner. Daniel Jackson, a doctoral candidate in second language studies at the University of Hawai‛i at Manoa, discusses the challenges and advancements in measuring attention in second language research. His essay is an excellent brief introduction to verbalization, eye-tracking, and neuroscientific methods as ways of measuring attention and understanding its role in instructed L2 learning.

We would particularly like to draw the attention of our graduate student members to Mr. Jackson’s article. We hope that as you read it, you will become inspired to submit your own research and reflections on language acquisition and learning, language pedagogy, and teacher education to the Graduate Student Corner.

Graduate students sometimes feel that their work is still too “raw” to be published; yet it is graduate students, along with their faculty mentors, who are at the cutting edge of both research and practice in the field. As editors of this newsletter, we would like to provide a forum for them to share their work.

Graduate students, if you are presenting a paper at the upcoming TESOL Convention, including the Graduate Student Forum or Doctoral Forum, or if you are working on a course project, a master’s thesis, or a doctoral dissertation, consider submitting a summary of your work or a portion of it for publication in our next issueofAL Forum, scheduled for June 2012.

Faculty mentors, if you are working with graduate students involved in projects that our professional community may be interested in, please encourage them to submit short reports on these projects to AL Forum.

The deadline for submissions of 1,500 words or less is April 15, 2012. Completed projects as well as reports on work in progress are welcome.

Looking forward to seeing you all in Philadelphia in March 2012!

Your editors,
Olga and Jana