Dear ICIS Members and Friends,

I hope that all of you have had a productive start to 2013!

As TESOL 2013 in Dallas approaches, the ICIS leadership team is becoming increasingly excited about our upcoming convention sessions and events, and we hope that many of you will be able to find the time to attend some of the ICIS presentations or drop by our interest section booth to say hello. If you can’t make it to Dallas, we hope you will be able to join us on our community site in the next few weeks to talk about intercultural topics.

This year we had over 150 proposals submitted for the convention, and we were able to select 32 of them. Thank you to everyone who submitted proposals and to those who spent long hours reviewing them. Each year we rely on many of our members to review the submissions, and we greatly appreciate your hard work.

We are especially looking forward to our 2013 Academic Session, "Teacher Values, Beliefs and Identities in the ESOL Classroom,” featuring Alivino Fantini, Lynne Diaz-Rico, Carla Chamberlin-Quinlisk, and Bonny Norton discussing aspects of teacher intercultural awareness. This presentation will take place Friday, March 22, at 10 am.

In addition, ICIS is collaborating with the Second Language Writing and Social Responsibility Interest Sections to explore intercultural rhetoric and non-Western TESOL perspectives.

I would like to invite you to the ICIS Open Meeting (Thursday, March 21, 5–6:30 pm, Room D222 in the Dallas Convention Center) to discuss issues of importance to ICIS in the upcoming year. I sincerely hope you can join us to share your thoughts, opinions, and suggestions! As always, ICIS members will go out afterward to share a meal and relax. Everyone is welcome.

Please also visit us in the TESOL Center on the Exhibit Floor at the convention, where we will have an ICIS booth on Thursday, March 21, 11 am–1 pm, and Friday, March 22, 3–5 pm.

I’d like to close by welcoming the newly elected members to our leadership team. Our incoming chair, Laura Jacob, has been working diligently and enthusiastically throughout the past year, organizing projects and working with other interest sections to put together the InterSection sessions. Thank you, Laura! I would also like to congratulate Nasima Yamchi on being elected chair-elect. Nasima has been doing a wonderful job, along with Amy Alice Chastain, as co-editor of our ICIS newsletter for the past year. Thanks go to both of our editors for coordinating a difficult task. We have a new addition to our team, Lena Shvidko, who was recently elected to the position of secretary for our interest section. Welcome, Lena! Finally, I’d like to say thank you to Chris Spackman, our community manager, for continuing to work with ICIS for another year. Thanks, Chris!

For those of you who can join us in Dallas, 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.