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Dear SLWIS Colleagues,
It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the second SLW News for 2020. I hope you and your families are
safe and healthy. In this letter, I would like to update you on our
accomplishments as Second Language Writing Interest Section (SLWIS), and
preview some of the activities we will be doing in the coming
year.
SLWIS, in its 16th service year, continues to be one of the
largest communities of practice in TESOL, with 1,100 members. Our MyTESOL
group is an interactive platform that is home to lively discussions on
second language writing, calls for proposals of special issues, book
projects, and other conferences related to teaching, writing, and
research.
SLWIS maintains an active presence on social media including
SLWIS Facebook
page, SLW IS Facebook Book
Club page, and our Twitter account. If
you’re interested in joining us, please click on the links. You can join
our SLW Virtual Book Club here. During
the recent unprecedented times, we kept our social media accounts active
to strengthen our community ties and engage our members in our online
events. Thank you for completing our SLWIS Membership Survey, as the
findings help us organize our activities based upon your
needs.
As we all know, 2020 has been an unusual year with the
unexpected arrival of COVID-19. With the TESOL 2020 Convention being
cancelled, the SLWIS leadership team worked on ways to migrate the SLWIS
academic and intersection sessions to alternative formats. As a result,
we moved our academic session panel “Diversity in L2 Writing: Creating
Inclusive Pedagogical and Administrative Approaches” to a webinar format
to be broadcast at the end of 2020. In addition, our intersection
sessions--the SLWIS-CALLIS session “Practical Approaches for Leveraging
Technology in L2 Writing Instruction,” the ICCIS-SLWIS session
“Exploring Good Writing, and Complexities of Cultural and Linguistics
Comparison,” and the BME-NNES SLWIS session “Affirming Multifaceted
Identities in TESOL” were moved to TESOL 2021 Convention.
In the month of June, we started other professional events that
consisted of webinars and online discussions. Our first event was the
TESOL ICIS & SLWIS joint webinar entitled “Robert
Kaplan's Legacy: From Contrastive Rhetoric to Intercultural Rhetoric
Research” led by Dr. Ulla Connor. Then we hosted our second
joint webinar called “Advocating
for Multilingual Writers through Anti-racist and Translingual Teaching
and Administrative Practices” in collaboration with SLW
Standing Committee at Conference on College Composition and
Communication (CCCC). In July, our SLWIS Book Club hosted an online
discussion session entitled “Changing Practices in L2
Writing: Beyond-the Five Paragraph Essay” with Nigel Caplan, Christine
Tardy, Estela Ene, and Ulla Connor as featured speakers. All our online
events were well-attended and productive, and if you have missed them,
the recordings of these sessions can be found on TESOL YouTube
Channel.
In addition to the webinars hosted by our interest section, we
were also invited to the TESOL
Affiliate Network webinar session to inform Affiliate members
from all over the world about SLWIS goals, activities, and future
plans. We shared our wish to collaborate with TESOL Affiliates to
further the field of L2 writing, and focus on social justice, diversity,
equality, and equity as key values for fair and effective instruction,
and a peaceful world.
Last month we started an interactive discussion series “Online Writing
Practices and Pedagogies.” On September 24, we had the first
interactive session in this series, during which Nigel Caplan
and Tanita Taenkhum talked about adapting writing assignments to online
platforms. At the end of October, we will have the second session
entitled "Qualitative Research Project with Genre Checkpoints in an
Online Graduate Writing Course.” The presenters Veronika Maliborska and
Natalya Watson will discuss how research interviews can serve as a
qualitative research tool to develop analysis and synthesis skills and
enhance language learning in an online graduate-level research-based
writing course. Stay tuned on more information about this event.
Finally, I am excited to share that SLWIS will host an academic
session “Online Writing Assessment Literacy, Strategies, and Tools for
L2 Writing Instruction” at the TESOL 2021 Convention in Houston, Texas.
We look forward to seeing you in this and other SLWIS sessions!
I’d also like to invite you to work with us in our interest
section. We are in the process of preparing for our SLWIS leadership
elections, and soon more information about the nominee process will be
announced. Please let us know if you would like to join our
team!
I would like to thank you, our members, very much for your
engagement, support, and dedication to professional growth. It’s you who
raise the quality of our field and contribute positively to the lives
of our next generation.
Best wishes,
Aylin
Aylin B. Atilgan Relyea (Chair 2020–2021) |
