Andrea Enikő Lypka, University of Tampa, Florida, USA

Greetings, ICIS Community,

To align with current institutional commitment to inclusive global learning, practitioners need to enact intercultural communicative practices by “combining language skills with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that help [the students] become ‘intercultural citizens,’ able to engage in intercultural communication, to think and act critically, and to negotiate the complexities of today’s world” (Byram, 2008, in Byram & Wagner, 2018, p. 141). However, reframing language instruction within the intercultural communication (IC) lens entails the negotiation of professional and personal identities. Educators who struggle integrating cross-cultural approaches in their classrooms will find the submissions in this issue valuable to enhance working understanding of IC-infused teaching practices.

In this issue, the contributors move the IC agenda forward by tackling the challenges of TESOL within the context of transnational mobility. At the same time, they invite practitioners to critically reflect on their practice to assist students to strategically adopt semiotic repertoires and metalanguage needed for global communication. To begin, Saurabh Anand from Minnesota State University critically interrogates the power dynamics that influence his identity negotiation as a transnational ESL instructor in the United States, German language tutor in India, and multilingual speaker through an autobiographical lens. The author recommends that, to counteract the deficit perspective, instructors draw on students’ backgrounds, skills, real-world experiences, semiotic resources, and digital technologies to design equitable learning spaces and support meaningful dialogue, empathy, belonging, and interconnectedness.

In the next submission, “Modifying a University Course to Align With Global Learning Outcomes,” ICIS co-editor Sharon Tjaden-Glass from Sinclair Community College reviews a book titled Teaching with a Global Perspective: Practical Strategies from Course Design to Assessment (Bikowski & Phillips, 2019). This handbook addresses the growing interest in language-culture interdependence in higher education with a focus on implementing these concepts in curriculum, course, assignment, and assessment. Rich with reflective questions, activities, scenarios, and rubrics, Teaching with a Global Perspective offers practical resources for practitioners, administrators, and staff to promote mutual learning spaces.

This issue concludes with a conference review, “English Language Teaching Unit Conference 2019 Report,” by Anastasiia Kryzhanivska from Bowling Green State University. The author highlights the themes and keynote sessions from this conference at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. In this report, the author extends the call for TESOL practitioners to expand professional development through conferences, “where working and personal relationships have conventions different from those in the United States.”

The submissions in this newsletter expand the scholarly conversations about IC through global perspectives and critical reflection. Instead of simplistic and dichotomous approaches to language education and IC, the contributors—students, practitioners, and scholars—urge the TESOL community to facilitate a global community of learning and advocate for students who speak English as an additional language. As always, thank you to everyone who added their voices in this issue. We hope that this issue will inspire your professional development.

Thank you for all you do for the Intercultural Communication Interest Section (ICIS) community, and we look forward to receiving your submissions for the March 2020 preconvention ICIS issue! You are welcome to email your articles, reflections, book reviews, conference reports, lesson plans, poems, photographs, or other submissions that explore the topic of IC. See submission guidelines for more information. Please note the next deadline for our call for submissions is 10 January 2020. If you have questions or ideas about the content of the ICIS newsletter, do not hesitate to contact the coeditors at newsletter.icis.tesol@gmail.com.

Best regards,

Andrea Enikő Lypka

ICIS Newsletter Coeditor

Reference

Byram, M., & Wagner, M. (2018). Making a difference: Language teaching for intercultural and international dialogue. Foreign Language Annals, 51, 140–151. doi:10.1111/flan.12319