Greetings to you all from your ALIS Forum co-editors, Jana Moore and Ben White. We have a jam-packed issue for you.

As many of you know, in this first issue out since the convention, we like to bring you articles by speakers from the InterSections and Academic Sessions in which ALIS participated. Before introducing those, however, we'd like to remind everyone that this year was ALIS's 40th year in existence within TESOL International. To mark this special occasion, we were honored by the presence of its founding father, Dr. Robert Kaplan. We thank Marianne Celce-Murcia for her wonderful introduction and presentation commemorating this occasion (many of her notes have been reproduced below), and we thank Eli Hinkel for organizing the event.

Dr. Kaplan was not only the founding father of the Applied Linguistics Interest Section; he helped establish TESOL as well, being a member of the organizational meetings in 1964 and 1965 that led to its formation. He attended all but four annual TESOL conventions between 1966 and 2001, served as president in 1989–1990, was on the parliamentary board on numerous occasions, and was elected an Honorary Life Member of TESOL in 1994. Lest we think that Dr. Kaplan was involved only with TESOL International, we should also mention that he was instrumental in writing the constitution of California TESOL (CATESOL) and served as its first president in 1970–1971. And only recently he retired from 12 years as editor of Issues in Applied Linguistics.

Dr. Kaplan has presented at hundreds of conferences and published extensively in the areas of language policy and planning, contrastive rhetoric, teaching reading, writing, and culture, among other topics. Throughout his career, he has inspired countless individuals and helped to establish applied linguistics as its own discipline. It is with sadness that we note the recent passing of one of Dr. Kaplan’s dearest colleagues and friends, Dr. Richard Baldauf, with whom he worked often. Dr. Kaplan's speech to ALIS to mark our 40th year of existence, “I've Never Metaphor I Didn't Like,” has been reprinted in the newsletter.

The next three articles stem from “Building Intercultural Competence in the Classroom,” an InterSection from the Portland convention that brought together the Interest Sections of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, and Elementary Education. In this session our distinguished guest speakers addressed the importance of developing intercultural values in our students. Adrian Holliday, in “Intercultural Awareness for Young Learners,” argues that the best way to help young learners engage in their new culture is to embrace their own culture, drawing similarities and differences. Joe McVeigh's article, “Practical Ways to Build Intercultural Competence in Young Learners,” presents concrete tools that can be used by teachers to help students address the differences in culture that they encounter. Finally, Bonny Norton and Espen Stranger-Johannessen's article, “Digital Stories as Intercultural Texts: The African Storybook Project and Young Learners,” tells the story of the work that's being done in Africa to address literacy through developing books from the oral traditions in Africa.

The final two articles come from Social Interaction and ELT Across Settings, an InterSection that paired Applied Linguistics with the Speech, Pronunciation, and Listening Interest Section. In “Why Gesture!” Gale Stam challenges us to embrace attention to gesture in both second language acquisition research and language teaching. In “What Is Interactional Competence?” Richard Young defines interactional competence and suggests how it might be addressed in the language classroom.

We hope you enjoy the newsletter and are already gearing up for Toronto in 2015.