Fellow ITA Professionals:

I’m Sarah Emory, and as a co-editor of the ITAIS Newsletter with Mary Jetter, I’m pleased to introduce our May issue. There are brief letters from our chair, Rebecca Oreto, and our chair-elect, Liz Tummons, as well as three fascinating articles.

Our first article, by Barbara Beers, Miki Mendelsohn, and Pamela Pollock, is a summary of the ITA training activities that they collected in their interesting session the 2014 convention in Portland. Their session was a discussion and compilation of activities that ITA professionals were successfully using in their programs to help develop various skills. As they gathered a huge amount of information, this article will include a variety of activities that might be of interest to you. The second part of their article, due to publish in our next newsletter, will look at pedagogy.

Our second article, written by Ekaterina Arshavskaya, is based on the author’s research and interviews with ITAs on their experiences in U.S. classrooms, and how this type of research can be used to better meet the needs of ITAs.

Our last article, by Baburhan Uzum, addresses the author’s interviews with several Fulbright language teaching assistants and reflects on how their cultural backgrounds influence and inform their interactions with their students as they teach in the United States.

Enjoy!