Welcome to the newsletter! I have been asked by Natalia, newsletter editor, to report on our recent activities for the Applied Linguistics Interest Section (ALIS).

Greetings, ALIS members! Our interest section (IS) has a robust membership within TESOL that represents a wide range of interests and interdisciplinary connections. As stated in our IS’s recently revised statement of purpose, our goal is to “promote research in all areas of language use, particularly research that contributes to our understanding of language learning and teaching…to promulgate knowledge derived from such research…in an attempt to address real-world, language-based issues pertinent to English language teaching.” We have been working to fulfill this goal through broader communication within our IS and beyond, through broad-based activities not only at the TESOL Convention but also in webinar formats and in innovations to our newsletter format under the editorship of Natalia Dolgova.

During this past year, we organized a successful webinar in collaboration with the Computer-Assisted Language Learning IS, entitled “Technology and Language Research and Teaching” with Shannon Sauro and Volker Hegelheimer. We hope to organize another webinar this fall or winter (U.S. time), so keep an eye out for that invitation. TESOL 2018 was also a great success, including a panel on critical approaches in applied linguistics, and two well-attended InterSections.

We are looking forward to the 2019 TESOL Convention, which will be organized under the new “strand” structure for the first time. This means that proposals were submitted directly to a set of theme-based strands that are distinct from the ISs. The ISs, on the other hand, still organize InterSection panels (in collaboration with one or more other ISs) and an academic session. One of our InterSections will be organized in conjunction with the Second Language Writing IS, exploring the challenges and barriers to ensuring that current research is represented in writing textbooks, in a session entitled, “Beyond Five-Paragraph Essays: Why Don’t Writing Textbooks Reflect Current Research?” Our second InterSection is a collaboration with the Refugee Concerns IS, investigating how refugee-background learners are represented in societal discourses, in classroom materials, and in their own narratives and discourses, and is entitled, “Discourses of Representation for Refugee-Background Learners: Empowerment and Collaboration.” Our Chair-Elect, Ben White, describes the academic session that he is organizing:

As the chair-elect, I am responsible for organizing an ALIS academic session at TESOL 2019. Work is currently underway on a colloquium that will spotlight cognitive linguistics and sociocultural theory and the promise both hold for more effective ESL/EFL pedagogy. Further details on the individual talks will be provided in the next (preconvention) newsletter.

We hope that you will join us in Atlanta for these sessions! Also from Ben:

I am in the process of establishing a series of webinars with authors of recent TESOL Quarterly articles. The basic idea is to invite authors of the most-read articles for an opportunity to interact directly with readers—in a sense, to bring their articles to life. TESOL members will be able to pose questions directly to these researchers, and the researchers will have the opportunity to tell the stories behind their studies. Stay tuned for details.

On another note, we invite your participation at the TESOL Convention and beyond. We are hoping to entice members into leadership positions, such as co-editor of the newsletter, or social media coordinator. These are good entryways into more substantial leadership positions, such as IS chair. I’d like to thank Olga Griswold for her work over the past few years as chair-elect, and then chair. Ben White has also been active as co-editor of the newsletter, and now as chair-elect, contributing significantly to our successful IS transition proposal to TESOL. Natalia Dolgova has done a fabulous job with this newsletter over the past few years, bringing new directions and connections to this venue. And, I am also grateful to our veteran leader, Eli Hinkel, who remains our community manager.

Please let me know if you are interested in joining our leadership team to help steward and grow our IS. If you have suggestions for webinars that you would like to see us sponsor, please let me know. See you in 2019!

ALIS Chair,

Kathryn Howard