Hello ICIS Friends!

As the two new co-editors of InterCom, we are pleased to present you with this latest edition. But first, we’d like to introduce ourselves to the whole community.

Sharon Tjaden-Glass is the Partnerships Coordinator and an instructor for the Intensive English Program at the University of Dayton. She coordinates academic partnerships between the IEP and academic departments, including course collaborations and partnerships with teacher education and continuous learning. She became interested in the ICIS community when she started researching best practices in intercultural communication to help inform her work in these partnerships.

Andrea Lypka is a program specialist at the Office for Undergraduate Research and a Ph.D. candidate in the Second Language Acquisition and Instructional Technology program at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include learner identity, participatory visual and digital research methods, discourse analysis, and community-university engagement.

We are pleased to serve the ICIS in our new roles as co-editors of InterCom and will do our best to provide this community with interesting readings to enrich your practice. In this edition, we will share two feature articles.

Our first feature article by Olga Muranova takes us into an area of intercultural communication in education that doesn’t receive as much attention as classroom interaction: the university writing center. She shares her research into the use of compliments between non-native English speakers (the tutees) and native-English speaking students (the tutors) and notes some of the largest differences in their use of compliments. She concludes with suggestions for implementing effective writing center tutor training.

Our second feature article by Willem de Goei describes how he addressed the lack of intercultural competence training in Japanese EFL context. Through an in-service teacher training that guided teachers through critical self-reflection, Willem created a space where intercultural competence was not focused on learning a “target culture,” but instead, focused on building cultural self-awareness.

Please also take time to read an ICIS community update from one of our former newsletter editors, Natalia Balyasnikova. She shares information about how you can become more active in our community.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to our August 2018 newsletter! Please do not hesitate to contact us at newsletter.icis.tesol@gmail.com if you have any questions or ideas about the content of our newsletter.

Please also take note of the next deadline for our call for submissions for the Fall 2018 newsletter, which is November 11, 2018. We look forward to reading your submissions!

Have a great start to the academic year!

Best regards,

Sharon Tjaden-Glass & Andrea Lypka

ICIS Newsletter Editors