Dear Readers,

Welcome to AL Forum, newsletter for the Applied Linguistics Interest Section!

First off, we would like to give a shout out to our new Chair-Elect, Kathy Howard. We thank her for her service and look forward to working with her over the next 3 years. Please check out her letter, in which Kathy introduces herself and lays out some critical questions for this diverse field we call applied linguistics.

Do not miss the letter from our Chair, Olga Griswold. Olga provides updates on TESOL’s organizational efforts at restructuring forums and interest sections. She also fills us in on InterSections planned for TESOL 2018 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. In an InterSection, two or more interest sections work together to field a panel of experts on a topical theme or burning question. Olga has been busy collaborating with Teacher Education, International Teaching Assistants, and Bilingual Education Interest Sections to give us three fascinating InterSection panel discussions.

For the current issue, we invited the presenters of four sessions at TESOL 2017 to share their very interesting work. First, Averil Coxhead brings us up to speed on current trends in research on specialized vocabulary. In our second article, Caroline Payant and Derek Reagan advocate for the use of task-supported language teaching to promote pragmatic competence. They describe a story completion task they have used for classroom attention to pragmatics. In our third article, Brian Butler and Beth Sheppard introduce the technique of paused-transcription for teaching listening and report on their use of this technique in a study set in an intensive English program. Finally, Howard Williams presents a nuanced examination of the semantics of sentence connectors with an eye toward pedagogical applications. All of these pieces draw on or engage directly in applied linguistics research. They investigate different aspects of language and offer multiple suggestions and considerations for the English language classroom.

We hope you enjoy the issue!

Best,

Ben & Natalia