Dear Members of Our ICIS Community,

First of all, as it is the first newsletter in this new year, let me personally wish you a growing, professionally engaging, and interculturally enriching 2019! Let this year offer us continuous opportunities for inspiring insights into our subject matters, occasions for sharing them among like- as well as unlike-minded, possibilities for developing our communities, and chances for enlarging our professional networks.

This is our last preconvention newsletter issue, as the Atlanta convention is approaching with great speed, again answering our need for manifold stimuli for our profession and offering us a “whole world” of different strand-oriented talks, presentations, workshops, exhibitions. Among them, we invite you also to attend three panels involving Intercultural Communication Interest Section (ICIS), which we have intentionally dedicated to crucial aspects of intercultural studies. First, our academic session will offer four views on reflexivity, ideally following last year’s focus on criticality and highlighting theoretical issues and then immersing them in different contexts. The second session, an InterSection panel, will focus on the question of assessment of intercultural competence, including again both theoretical positions as well as practical outcomes. The third will look at diverse intercultural education models, taken from stimulating educative practices in different parts of the world and dealing with the first and other cultures.

The convention is also the occasion to join the interest section open meetingsto get to know this year’s ICIS leaders and their future plans and focuses, to share highlights from recent international experiences, and to hear reports from other affiliates’ conferences around the world and news of present meaningful research carried in our own workplaces. You are most welcome to join us!

In addition, ICIS is planning to host three webinars, timed pre- or post- convention, given by leading experts from both sides of the Atlantic. Announcements regarding this information can be found on MyTESOL.

Now allow me some personal and concluding thoughts about what I believe matters most to so many of us. Namely, the huge role education in general, and language education in particular, has in the present world, which has become more globalised, unprecedentedly mobile, multilocal, plurilingual, and multicultural. To cite Michael Byram’s (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence, to be able to interact within this world and to know how to engage with it is truly vital, even more for young learners, who need to be encouraged in their path of exploration, discovery, and consciousness-building. Learners need an expansive language education which goes hand-in-hand with critical cultural awareness, citizenship education, human rights education, and cosmopolitanism. In this sense, classrooms (and language classrooms even more easily) become open spaces for innovative teaching practices, multimodal communication, and interculturality at all levels of different countries’ educational steps. Learners need a space where we can experience the complexities of human interactions to explore and reflect critically on our ideas as well as those from other identities and cultures.

Looking forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

Barbara Lapornik

 ICIS Chair

References

Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.