Welcome to the summer 2012 edition of the ALIS Forum. As your coeditors we’ve set two different foci for this edition: a brief recap of the TESOL Convention in Philadelphia as well as more articles from our growing graduate student population.

Before we get into our featured articles, we’d like to send out a huge thank you to Dilin Liu, our outgoing ALIS chair, for all his hard work these past few years. You can read all about his involvement specifically with the convention in the Past Chair Letter. Kara Hunter now takes over as our current chair after having helped put together one of our Academic Sessions in Philadelphia. Finally, we’d like to welcome our incoming chair, Eli Hinkel!

And now to our featured articles…

As stated previously, our focus in this edition has two different directions. First we have an article from Zuzana Tomaš and Sara Okello titled “Examining Instruction on Writing from Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism,” a topic of great concern to many teachers and researchers, followed by the article “What Teachers Need to Know About Speech Act Research” by Noel Houck, which offers a summation on past speech act research to enable teachers to best help their students in this area of language learning. Both of these articles were presented in Philadelphia, so if you weren’t able to attend the conference or their presentations (or if you just want to know more), we think you’ll find these contributions very worthwhile.

We then continue our series on publishing articles from graduate students on the master’s and doctorate level. In this issue Rachel Bassett, Nicholas Caballero, and Jennie Criddle discuss the issue of asking questions in the classroom in their article, “The Usefulness of Questions in Classroom Contexts.” Stephen Skalicky’s article, “Politics and Pragmatics: My Shift From Rhetoric and Composition to Applied Linguistics” gives one student’s perspective of a shift toward interest in applied linguistics. Finally, Tanya Erdelyi and Virginia Kita’s article, “Teaching and Encouraging Modals: A Study of One Student’s Use of Should,” presents a pilot study investigating modal use, a challenge for many of our learners. All three of these articles represent research ideas and trends from newcomers to the field, and are well worth our consideration.

We welcome comments from our readers, and if you have a contribution to make please do not hesitate to contact either of us.