Dear Applied Linguistics Interest Section Members,

I am very excited to be able to write to you, our international community of applied linguists and TESOL practitioners, with information about our plans for the TESOL 2017 convention in Seattle and a report of ideas that came out of our interest section’s (IS’s) business meeting last spring in Baltimore.

For those who do not know me, let me first very briefly introduce myself. I have been teaching ESL for 30 years, including noncredit adult education and EFL at a college in Japan and at university ESL and ESL intensive institutes. I have been training teachers at the MA level for more than 10 years and am currently the coordinator of the MA TESOL Program at San Francisco State University. I have been a member of TESOL and the Applied Linguistics IS for 20 years, and I am glad to be serving as Chair of the IS for the second time. My interests include microanalysis of classroom interaction, the teaching of pragmatics, teacher training, and curriculum development.

At the business meeting last spring, we discussed ideas for fostering more online communication, including a possible Facebook page as well as webcast talks or online discussions of topical readings.

I am excited to tell you about two InterSection panels that our IS has organized in collaboration with other interest sections, bridging research and practical insights for language teaching.

First, we are partnering with the English for Specific Purposes IS to present a panel on “Authentic English for Business, Medical, and Legal Purposes”that will bring together researchers working on discourse of these professional areas to share research insights from sociolinguistic research, situated language assessment, and qualitative study of leadership talk with an audience of language educators and teacher trainers. We are excited to have panelists including Margaret van Naerssen, who works on legal discourse and language assessment; Kevin Knight, who works on leadership discourse and ESP; and Felicia Robert, who uses conversation analysis to study discourse in medical contexts.

Next, we have worked with Refugee Concerns and Adult Education Interest Sections to organize a panel on “Connecting Research to Practice: Serving Adult Emergent Readers.”This research-to-practice panel includes SLA-informed recommendations for instruction, assessment, and teacher education, including such areas as balancing literacy and language, using mobile devices, and employing multimodal design in literacy assessments and classroom pedagogy. The presenters represent a wealth of expertise and are all researchers who are committed to informing classroom practice: Patsy Egan Vinogradov, Jenna Altherr Flores, Martha Bigelow, and Raichle Farrelly.

I also want to strongly recommend a very exciting academic session that has been organized by our chair-elect, Olga Griswold, on issues related to the role of linguistics in TESOL teacher education. More information on this event will follow in our next newsletter.

While we are still waiting for the final list of submitted sessions for the 2017 convention, I can tell you that we had a rich and exciting diversity of proposals for our IS, drawing from a wide range of subdisciplines of applied linguistics and addressed to broad variety of teaching contexts. Overall, this looks to be an exciting convention with excellent contributions from the applied linguistics area.

We hope to see you in Seattle, at the presentations and at our annual business meeting where we are able to gather face to face. While we are working on new ways to facilitate connections among our members between conferences, this newsletter has been and remains an informative and easily available voice of our IS—the archives are available in our Applied Linguistics IS of the TESOL website. Please consider contributing your own work. And finally, many thanks to our newsletter editors, Benjamin White, Monika Ekiert, and Natalia Dolgova, for your excellent work.

David Olsher