Dear ALISers,

As I am writing this piece on a rather warm (about 35°C) July afternoon in Southern California, some of us are decompressing from the academic year and taking a well-deserved break, others are immersing themselves into research full time, and still others are heading into the classrooms to teach and learn. Whatever we are busy with this summer or winter (depending where on the globe we are), it is my great pleasure to write to you with some ideas and updates that came out of the ALIS business meeting this past March, to update you on TESOL restructuring, and to share some plans for the 2018 TESOL Annual Convention & English Language Expo in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

ALIS 2017 Business Meeting

I am glad to report that our turnout for the business meeting was the highest I have seen in quite a few years. More than 20 members, including a substantial number of graduate students, made appearances and contributed significantly to the discussion of plans for the future of the interest section (IS).

Still, if we think about how large our IS is—it is the second largest within TESOL, with nearly 1,500 primary members—the number of attendees constituted only a small percentage of our membership. I’d like to encourage our seasoned members to please come to the next meeting in Chicago, introduce themselves, and share their ideas for how our IS can develop and grow.

I also encourage all of the current and recent graduate students and new members to join the ALIS community in person. The annual business meeting is an excellent chance for them to meet the scholars whose articles and books they have been reading and whose work serves as a foundation of their professional learning. It is also a perfect opportunity to get involved in the ALIS leadership.

And of course, I call on classroom teachers from all educational settings to bring their perspectives on the development and growth of the IS. We are a research-oriented group. That is true. But our goal, or mission, if you will, is to bring the researchers and the practitioners together, to explore the ways in which classroom practices can inform future research, and the ways in which research findings can be applied “on the ground” to enhance language learning and teaching. We, researchers and practitioners, need each other, so let’s come together at the next business meeting and begin developing stronger collaborative ties.

The annual business meeting is one venue that allows us to put faces to names, to strike personal conversations, to forge research and teaching relationships, and to get involved in the life of our professional and scholarly organization. Another venue that I am proud to announce is our newly developed Facebook page. Please visit us or search for “Applied Linguistics Interest Section TESOL” when you are on Facebook. We have some interesting posts and announcements, and we are working on preparing a series of webinars, which we’ll be announcing on our Facebook page.

An Update on TESOL Restructuring

As you may already know, TESOL International Association is in the process of internal restructuring. In the pursuit of increased engagement among the members of the association, TESOL seeks to somewhat reformulate how member groups function. After a long process of information gathering and deliberation, TESOL has decided that in April of 2018, two new—well, somewhat new—internal groups will replace the current forums and interest sections. They will be professional learning networks, or PLNs, and interest sections, or ISs.

This is not a mere matter of relabeling, however. Each forum and currently existing interest section will need to apply for the new status this coming October. The future status as a PLN or IS will be open to both forums and current ISs, so what is the difference?

PLNs will be informal, self-structured, discussion-based groups. There is no minimum number of members for a PLN, and they can form and disband easily by simply notifying TESOL annually of their launch or dissolution. At present, there is no plan to provide PLNs with any specific designated space for meeting and discussion at the annual convention.

ISs will remain what they essentially are now. They will, however, require a minimum of 20 members and will have to engage in ongoing, sustained, knowledge-generating activities throughout the year. These may be in any form that the membership deems appropriate, from newsletters to webinars to any other form of active engagement.  Each IS will also have to submit an annual continuous improvement plan and a 3-year self-assessment and review. ISs will be assigned a TESOL staff member as a liaison with the association. As now, ISs will be given an opportunity to sponsor one unadjudicated academic session and one unadjudicated InterSection at each annual convention. ISs will also be able to serve as secondary participants in InterSections sponsored by other ISs. Currently, TESOL does not stipulate a limit on the number of InterSections in which an IS can be a secondary participant.

ALIS plans to submit a letter of intent to remain an IS by the end of October, as specified by the TESOL Board of Directors. Our current leadership team, of course, will keep all ALISers abreast of any developments between now and our next convention in Chicago in March of 2018.

TESOL 2018 in Chicago

Now, to the plans for the Chicago convention. I hope most of us took some time in May to submit presentation proposals for the March 2018 convention in Chicago and volunteered our services as reviewers of the submissions by other potential participants. With the new abstract management system that TESOL implemented this year, the process of submission and review was somewhat riddled with problems, but I am happy to report that most of the kinks were worked out, and the review is on track as of the time of this writing.

Aside from a healthy number of individual paper proposals, we have several very interesting IS-based events planned for the convention. Kathy Howard, our chair-elect, is putting together an exciting academic session entitled “Critical Applied Linguistics: What It Means for Language, Language Development, Research, and Teacher Education.” Please see the details in Kathy’s letter in this issue.

In addition to the academic session, ALIS is participating in three InterSections. The first one, on which ALIS is partnering with the Teacher Education IS, is devoted to transdisciplinarity in second language acquisition (SLA) research and teaching. I am sure that most of our members are familiar with the now-seminal Douglas Fir Group paper that appeared in the Modern Language Journal in 2016. This paper, written jointly by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, proposed a transdisciplinary framework for SLA. The framework seeks to integrate the various disciplinary perspectives in the pursuit of further illuminating the multifaceted, multilayered processes of additional language learning and teaching. During the InterSection, several of the Douglas Fir Group authors will share their views on what the transdisciplinary approach to SLA means for both language teaching and teacher education. There is no one “perfect” or “correct” way to learn or teach a language. The panelists will focus on how the transdisciplinary perspective can serve teachers in designing effective learning environments in their particular circumstances and how practitioners can contribute to the expansion and development of the transdisciplinary take in the field.

The second InterSection is a product of cooperation between the International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) IS and ALIS. It continues the theme of transdisciplinarity as it applies to ITA concerns. Presenters will share findings from discourse analysis, communities of practice, course logic perspectives, and instructional planning to bring forth the discussion of best practices in preparing ITAs for academic interaction in their fields.

Finally, ALIS is also collaborating with the Bilingual Education IS on bringing together a panel of experts to discuss the advances in oral language instruction and oral academic language development for emerging bilinguals of different levels of proficiency and of different ages. When it comes to academic language proficiency, literacy seems to be the “favored child,” so to say. Over the years, numerous scholars have provided the field with invaluable contributions to our understanding of how reading and writing are acquired, and how such acquisition can be fostered in a classroom. Yet, oral language is also essential for school success. Panelists in this InterSection will discuss the history of oral academic language teaching, explore teachers’ theories of practice with respect to oral language pedagogy, and examine some of the most successful approaches to oral language instruction.

As all of these sessions take shape, we’ll be keeping our members up to date on their organization and scheduling.

In the meantime, I wish all ALISers a productive summer and academic year.

Peace,

Olga Griswold

Reference

The Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal, 100(S1), 19–47. doi: 10.1111/modl.12301