Dear ICIS Members and Friends,

It was great to meet up with some of you at our exciting conference in New Orleans! Thanks to all of you that presented, participated, and promoted the importance of intercultural English language teaching. As some of you know we had an amazing turnout for our ICIS open meeting and post-meeting dinner, where some of you showed off your dancing talents!

We’d like to welcome Chris Spackman as our new web/community manager; he has helped launch our online ICIS TESOL community site. Thanks for your proactive work, Chris! We’d also like to welcome Annette Bradford as incoming chair of the ICIS. Annette will be coordinating our upcoming InterSections for TESOL 2012 (thanks, Annette)! And thanks, Laura, for so effectively coordinating and publishing this newsletter to share valuable IC information and knowledge with all of us.

At this year’s convention a number of big changes were announced regarding how we as TESOL members communicate with each other. TESOL introduced the online TESOL Community that is now up and running. We encourage you to explore it! (Visit this link for helpful information on participating in online discussions.) This community allows us to interact with other TESOL members in secure online discussions to share resources and thoughts about the profession. It also offers ICIS an exciting opportunity to network with each other, to share IC resources/links (in our own online ICIS library!), and to discuss our upcoming work at TESOL 2012. With ICIS Matt Sutin’s help, Chris and the team has now set up an ICIS Facebook site that is entirely optional to join for more informal IC social networking; thanks, Matt, for initiating this work! (To join, see the Intercultural Communication and TESOL page on Facebook.)

We invite you to explore these ICIS online communities and get involved. We would particularly love your input in several discussions we have created in our ICIS TESOL community site. Chris has set up a library/resource-sharing discussion area where we encourage you to share books, links, and resources that help build our IC knowledge base. In addition, Annette and Geoff have set up an area for your input on our upcoming TESOL 2012 Academic Session and our InterSections (Intersections are where we collaborate with other ISs to host a panel of speakers). We have confirmed panels with the EFLIS (our primary InterSection that we will be leading) to potentially discuss issues around “whose culture” do we teach. The EFLIS and the CALLIS are also working with us on a second InterSection about “Promoting Intelligibility Across Cultures in the EFL Classroom Through CALL.” For our third and final InterSection we’ll be teaming up with ESPIS (English for Specific Purposes) to discuss a collaborative topic around training for workplace cultural communication.

We’re looking for your input on topics/speakers for our primary InterSection with EFL so please log into our ICIS TESOL community and share your thoughts. In addition, we would love your help to define topics/speakers for our TESOL 2012 Academic Session, so please share your ideas with us to help us make the 2012 convention in Philadelphia (Theme: A Declaration of Excellence) an ICIS success!

So please get involved in our online discussions and communities! We’ve set up an area introducing the ICIS Steering Committee members with a discussion area for questions/comments/suggestions so please share any thoughts you have that can make ICIS even more successful.

Many thanks and enjoy the beginning of summer (or winter if you’re south of the equator)!