As the immediate past chair of ALIS, I would first like to express my appreciation to all of you who helped me in the past year. I would like to especially thank my leadership team members, including Howard Williams (the then past chair), Kara Hunter (chair-elect), Scott Phillabaum (our e-community manager), and Olga Griswold and Jana Moore (our IS newsletter editors). I would also like to thank all of those (over 20) members who attended our IS annual business meeting at this year’s TESOL convention in Philadelphia.

I am also happy to report that our IS had a good show at this year’s TESOL convention. There were a total of 28 ALIS sessions including, among others, one Academic Session, two InterSessions, and three colloquia. All of the sessions went well. Equally important, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you the main issues we discussed at our IS business meeting. Apart from the routine activities such as reports from the various leadership team members and the introduction of our new chair-elect, Eli Hinkel, we spent most of the time at the business meeting discussing the current trends and concerns in our IS.

The first major trend or concern we agreed upon is that although we are still one of the largest ISs in TESOL, we have lost quite a few members. The reasons for this loss appear to include the following. First, unlike most of the other ISs, our IS does not focus on any specific skill (such as pronunciation or second language writing), any specific group of students (such as elementary or secondary students), or any specific concern (such as nonnative speakers or social responsibilities). What draws us (mostly college professors and graduate students) to ALIS appears to be a common interest in research. Yet, in recent years, it seems that both college professors and graduate students are becoming more specialized in their research. So some of them have left our IS to join other more specialized ISs (e.g., Second Language Writing and Intercultural Communication) as their primary IS. Second, some of our members have left our IS and TESOL completely. These individuals used to be simultaneously members of the the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL, a research-oriented organization) and they have left us and chosen to be members of only AAAL because TESOL is now considered an organization mainly for practitioners. There is likely another reason some of these individuals leave our IS and TESOL. In the past, AAAL and TESOL annual conferences were held in the same city consecutively, so many of our members were able to attend both conferences. In recent years, the two annual conferences have been held in different cities. Because of this change and perhaps also because of the poor economy we have been in, some of our members have decided to attend the AAAL conference only.

Another major concern discussed at the meeting is how to get ALIS members actively involved in the running of the IS. In the past few years, we have had a very difficult time finding individuals to run for the chair/chair-elect position, despite repeated email appeals from the IS leadership. Also, our attendance at annual business meetings during the annual convention is low (between 20 to 30 members), considering that our IS has a total membership of close to 1,000. Perhaps we are not alone with this problem. However, if this is a problem only our IS faces, then the nature of our IS as described above (i.e., we do not concentrate on one issue) may have contributed to the problem. We hope making this problem known to the entire membership will get more members to become involved in the running of our IS.

Furthermore, I would like to encourage all of our IS members to think about the aforementioned issues and any other issues you believe our IS faces as well as about the future directions in which our IS should be developing/moving, and then share your thoughts and ideas with us via our e-community.

Finally, I hope you all have a restful and productive summer and a successful new school year to come.