Dear ICIS Members and Friends!

As TESOL 2012 in Philadelphia approaches, we are increasingly excited about the work ICIS continues to do in TESOL.

Thanks to the wonderful abstracts submitted by you, our members and friends, the conference has an impressive selection of IC-related sessions for the upcoming convention. Our Academic Session, “Working With Identity to Deepen Intercultural and Language Teaching,” features Bonny Norton from UBC, Brian Morgan from York University, and three other scholars discussing various aspects of learner identity and intercultural ESOL teaching.

In addition, ICIS is collaborating on three different InterSections with the EFL, CALL, and ESP Interest Sections. With the EFLIS, we’re exploring the question of English cultures in a panel discussing “Whose Culture? Teaching Culture in the EFL Classroom.” ICIS is also working with EFL and CALL to present an InterSection on “Promoting Intelligibility Across Cultures in the EFL Classroom Through CALL.” Our third InterSection, hosted with ESPIS, will explore “The Impact of Culture on Effective Communication in Specific Environments.” If you can join us in Philadelphia, we hope you’ll join us at some of these exciting sessions!

In addition, we would like to invite you to the ICIS Open Meeting (Thursday, March 29, from 6:45-8:15pm, Room 106-B) to discuss issues of importance to ICIS over the upcoming year. We sincerely hope you can join us to share your thoughts, opinions, and suggestions! Following ICIS tradition, members will go out afterward to share a meal and relax. Everyone is welcome.

Please also stop by and visit us in the TESOL Center on the Exhibitor Floor at the convention where we will have an ICIS booth for several hours likely on Thursday 29 March and Friday 30 March during the convention. ICIS will be sharing this booth space with other interest sections, so once the schedule is confirmed, we’ll send out an announcement to the e-list with ICIS booth hours and the location of the ICIS Open Meeting.

In addition, we’d like to welcome our incoming chair Annette Bradford, who has been helping us diligently with ICIS work all through the year and working with other interest sections to coordinate our upcoming InterSections―thanks Annette! We’d also like to congratulate Laura Jacob, who was recently elected incoming chair-elect! As many of you know, Laura has been doing amazing work editing and shaping the online ICIS newsletter that promotes intercultural ESOL topics to the wider community. Thanks, Laura! We’d also like to thank Chris Spackman, our Web/community manager, for offering to continue working with ICIS for another year to help us forge the ICIS online and Facebook communities. Thanks, Chris! We hope to continue to develop our online community this year so if any of you have any suggestions, please attend the ICIS Open Meeting or e-mail us. As you can see, ICIS is truly a collaborative effort, so we thank all of you who support our work to promote intercultural approaches in ESOL/TESOL.

We’d like to close by sharing this quote from an article in this newsletter by Dr. Alvino E. Fantini entitled “Teaching ESOL As Intercultural Competence”:

Intercultural contact is a provocative educational experience precisely because it permits people to learn about others and themselves.

For those of you who can join us in Philadelphia, we look forward to seeing you. For all ICIS members and friends, please join us in the ICIS online community or e-mail us with any suggestions/comments to help further advance ICIS’ work.