Dear SLWIS Community,

I hope that this message finds you well. It was good to see many of you in Toronto for a vibrant convention that included a variety of interesting sessions. For our academic session on theory-informed practice in second language writing, we were very fortunate to have established experts in our field such as John Swales share activities that can inform our teaching of academic writing. Our InterSections with Adult Education, Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) were also very well received and included long-standing SLWIS members such as Ann Johns, Deborah Crusan, and Ken Hyland. Thank you to all our outstanding presenters and engaged presentation attendees.

The upcoming convention in Baltimore is a special one as TESOL will be celebrating its 50th anniversary. I really hope to see many of you there so we can all join in the celebrations and make the most of out the convention. For TESOL 2016, 237 proposals were submitted and we were able to accept 53 (up from 48 last year), in addition to nine poster sessions and two roundtable sessions. This means that the overall acceptance rate was approximately 27%. Thank you to all our proposal reviewers and to all who submitted proposals.

We always like to offer the convention attendees a balance of different types of sessions to attend, and we also seek to increase the diversity of presenters and include presenters from outside the United States. In some institutions, the support to attend TESOL is granted only if one presents at the convention. We continue to encourage presenters from outside the United States to attend TESOL and apply for TESOL’s financial support to do so.

Although attending the international TESOL Convention is very important to stay connected with the organization and with colleagues, there are other ways to do so. In the SLWIS, we are always interested in involving membership outside the convention. In order to do this, we have begun to strengthen our online presence via social media while also offering webinars. In May 2015, our past chair Todd Ruecker organized a very active and well-attended webinar on the qualities of a second language writing teacher. This topic emerged from one of our discussions on the SLWIS e-list, which focused on the role and status of native- and nonnative-English-speaking teachers. We thank our friends and colleagues in the NNESTIS for their leadership and for engaging our membership in such an important discussion. While many interesting and engaging discussions happen organically on our e-list, webinars offer an opportunity to engage with a topic in more detail, so we will continue to offer webinars for our membership. We welcome your suggestions for topics.

Our newsletter is also another way that helps us stay connected. Thank you Ilka and the rest of your team for putting together your first issue, and thank you to all the contributors. Enjoy this issue and see you all in Baltimore, or earlier this fall in Auckland, New Zealand, for the Symposium of Second Language Writing!