Greetings ALISers! We hope you’re getting ready for the upcoming TESOL International Convention, and so in the spirit of all things Dallas, we’ve dedicated this issue of the ALIS Forum to the convention. We’ve asked some of our presenters this year to make short contributions that, we hope, will act as teasers and pique your interest in the different areas of research our fellow ALISers are currently investigating.

Our first article is by Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, Heidi Vellenga, Sabrina Mossman, and Roosevelt Faulkner, who will be presenting “Teaching Expressions for Academic Discussion: Corpus-Based Materials That Work.” This is followed by Mark Johnson, Leonardo Mercado, and Anthony Acevedo’s work, “Research Insights into Expanding L2 Writing Vocabulary.”Next, Chi-yin Hong and Yung-gi Wu are presenting “EFL Teachers’ Pragmatic Evaluation of Learners’ Face-Threatening Acts.” Finally, Lía Kamhi-Stein and Nairi Issagholian write in this issue about “Language Classrooms as Complex and Harmonious Systems.” Randall Rebman represents our Graduate Student Corner this issue with “Preferred Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategies of EAP Reading Students.” Please check out their articles in this issue and stop by their presentations at the convention.

There are many more fabulous presentations that fall under Applied Linguistics as well as our academic and joint sessions (see the message in this issue from Kara Hunter, our current chair, for those details), so no doubt many of us will be quite busy in Dallas. Please make sure you take time to join us for our ALIS business meeting, which will be held on Thursday night at the convention. Also at the business meeting we will be saying goodbye to Kara Hunter as our outgoing chair, looking for new insights with this year’s chair, Eli Hinkel, and we’ll meet our chair-elect, Hayriye Kayi Aydar (look for her bio in this issue’s About This Community). We look forward to seeing you all there!

On a final note, as your co-editors we are always looking for more and new contributions to this newsletter, so feel free to contact either one of us if you’d like to contribute. We’re always looking for book reviewers as well as submissions from graduate students for our Graduate Student Corner, among other things.

Your ALIS Forum Co-editors,

Olga Griswold & Jana Moore