Dear TESOL Intercultural Communication Interest Section members and friends,

I am happy to serve as the Chair of Intercultural Communication Interest Section (ICIS) this year (March 2019 to March 2020) and work with the ICIS leadership team and the membership to promote and serve our professional community. It seems it was a short while ago that we gathered in Atlanta for TESOL 2019 convention, where the ICIS hosted a very successful Open Meeting. We also generated many good ideas via a post-convention survey of those who attended the Open Meeting to help us chart the course for our future actions and set our immediate goals.

Now, as we plan for next year’s convention, I hope many of you submitted proposals for consideration because the more proposals that are submitted to the Culture and Intercultural Communication strand, the more presentations will be under this designation on the program in Denver, Colorado at TESOL 2020. Also, you might have seen my announcements about my collaborative work with other interest sections to organize intersection panels. This year, the ICIS is collaborating with several interest sections (English for Specific Purposes, Second Language Writing, Refugee Concerns, and Social Responsibility) in organizing relevant and much-needed intersection sessions that bring intercultural learning and communication dimensions to the forefront. So, there is much to look forward at TESOL 2020.

Also, this year, the ICIS Steering Committee looks forward to cultivating opportunities for ongoing professional development and dialogue. These will include two webinars, the solicitation of ICIS Newsletter contributions, discussions via MyTESOL, and more. We will post more about IS-related activities via MyTESOL.

Following educator traditions in my academic and cultural context, I would like to recommend some short summer readings. I initially wanted to recommend a recent book with intercultural learning as its topic, but I could not settle on a specific one. Therefore, I would like to share an article (referenced below) that caught my attention recently while I was working on updating slides for my introductory level course on second language acquisition for pre-service teachers and looking for the latest studies on language attitudes. This study was done by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada, where they explored whether and how infants were making connections between languages and ethnicities based on the people they encountered in their environment. Studies like these always fascinate me as they are very much relevant to the connections we make when we discuss culture and language learning, social use of language, and speaker characteristics. I think there is something to be learned from the outcomes of this study and its implications for language and intercultural learning, as well as questions to be asked. This is something to discuss with my students in the upcoming semester, especially because many of them are preparing to be elementary education teachers.

If the above topic is not of interest to you, and you would like to read and brush up your insights into intercultural communication, I recommend another good recent find, an open access journal,Intercultural Communication Education, which has an excellent editorial board and is a good source for pedagogical ideas that are theory- and research-based.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to use myTESOL’s ICIS community group as a space to ask questions, to share information and insights related to professional activities and experiences, to inspire dialogue with your fellow ICIS members, or just to share resources. I look forward to your contributions to ICIS’s pursuits!

References

May, L., Baron, A., & Werker, J. (2019). Who can speak that language? Eleven-month-old infants have language-dependent expectations regarding speaker ethnicity. Developmental Psychology, 1-15.