The biggest update to the ICIS and all other interest sections in TESOL is the opening of a new online community platform, myTESOL. This platform is replacing the old listserv we have been using for the first part of this academic year. TESOL and each interest section are currently working on reorganizing the roles and responsibilities of interest section leaders.

Because of this new platform, I have stopped working on our website using Wordpress. However, our Facebook page and Facebook group continue to thrive. Although not very active lately, our numbers continue to grow. In October, I reported that our Facebook page had 951 likes. Now it has 1,059 likes. I’m not a big fan of this page because it’s not interactive. It serves as a platform where we can make announcements to all who follow and like our Facebook page. This is a way to reach nonmembers of TESOL, so one way we could use this page is to recruit more members.

Our Facebook group is interactive, and we have increased our membership here from 55 in October to 60 in January. However, we haven’t been actively posting anything for the last month. When we post things on our group, we get around 20 views per post but not many comments. There are multiple possibilities why this is so. I believe one contributor is the new myTESOL platform, which I believe should be the primary means of engagement.

TESOL ICIS YouTube Playlists of Films

Don’t forget about our lists of films for cross-cultural and intercultural communication, which we created last summer. There are 92 feature film trailers to view and 24 documentary trailers to view.

If you’d like to add more feature films or documentaries to this list, please send them through the myTESOL platform and/or the Facebook group.

Jeremy D. Slagoski, PhD
Community Manager of TESOL ICIS
Curriculum Coordinator of CESL
Southern Illinois University
Twitter: @jdslagoski