Greetings, ALIS Members!

Welcome to the spring issue of AL Forum. As we look toward April and the TESOL convention, we have three short articles from upcoming presentations in Baltimore. In the first, Eli Hinkel tackles construction grammar and its connections to L2 production skills. She encourages teachers to target collocations and formulaic expressions when teaching speaking and writing across proficiency levels. In our second article, Stephanie Link, Elena Cotos, and Sarah Huffman share their work on the development of pedagogical materials for graduate-level, academic writing courses. They use discipline-specific corpora to establish cross-disciplinary moves and steps within the discussion/conclusion sections of research articles. Finally, Harisimran Sandhu discusses the concept of learner autonomy. He explores the advantages to and the teacher’s role in autonomous learning.

We encourage you to check out the letters from the chair and from the chair-elect in this issue. They are full of information about the upcoming TESOL convention. Nihat describes what looks to be a fascinating InterSection session, which he has helped organize with the Teacher Education IS. He also has some good news about an ALIS reception on the evening of 6 April. David introduces what is sure to be an equally fascinating academic session, which he has put together around L2 pragmatics and pedagogy.

As David notes in his letter, Baltimore will be an opportunity to continue to discuss ways of spurring more communication and involvement within our ALIS community. If you are coming to the convention, please do consider attending the ALIS open meeting on Wednesday, 6 April, 6:45 pm–8:15 pm, in Room 326. There are sure to be fresh ideas and a lively discussion on how to improve our community!

Best wishes for 2016!

Ben & Monika