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Dear SLWIS Colleagues,
I am excited to chair the SLW-IS this year as our interest section continues to “facilitate interaction among TESOL members who desire to further the teaching and research of second language (L2) writing in different contexts and settings, including ESL and EFL,” according to our statement of purpose.
As of February 1, 2022, the SLW-IS reached 1,326 members. Our community is healthy, but there is always room for more members. As we rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic, I hope that more SLW professionals join us. It was exciting to see more EFL members attend SLW-IS and TESOL events during the pandemic. I hope that our EFL contingent will continue to grow and that our activities will continue to be relevant, informative, as well as reflective of EFL expertise.
This year, we are experimenting with this very newsletter by shifting from a single-editor model to a team of three editors. The purpose of this shift is to expand the network of contributors we can reach, streamline the production of the newsletter by distributing the work across more editors, and help professionalize a graduate-student-editor through a mentorship model. With the present newsletter, we inaugurate this shift and hope to see it work well for years to come.
This summer, using input obtained from our membership in our April open meeting, I contacted presenters and submitted proposals for a SLW-IS Academic Session and an Intersection Session. At TESOL 2023, our IS and the rest of the TESOL membership can look forward to our academic session titled “Perspectives on Critical Language Awareness: Theory and Practice,” in which I will lead a discussion with Shawna Shapiro (Middlebury College), Parva Panahi (Metro State University), and Kimberly Adelia Helmer (University of California) about the meaning and applications of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) from the perspectives of transculturalism, linguistic landscaping in EAP, and internationalization. Our intersection session with the Materials Writers IS will focus on “SLW Materials for Adult Education, ESP, Academic Honesty, and Play.” Presenters Salim Razi (Canakale Onsekiz Mart University), Lisa McGrath (Sheffield Hallam University), Joseph Vance (Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette), and Scott Douglas (University of British Columbia) will present principles and best practices of SLW materials design for ESL, EFL, Adult Education, and ESP contexts. The use of play for language/SWL learning and designs that foster academic honesty will be in special focus. With these fabulous sessions, we continue our own tradition of excellent and useful offerings (the most recent ones are reviewed in our Spring 2022 Newsletter.
We look forward to a rich line-up of SLW topics in the TESOL 2023 schedule. We also plan to continue our online book club and webinar series this year. Please stay tuned for details, which will be shared through our community through TESOL as well as on Facebook and Twitter.
Wishing everyone an excellent academic year,
Estela Ene
Professor and Chair of English
Indiana University Indianapolis
SLW-IS Chair
Estela Ene is Professor and Chair of English at Indiana University - Indianapolis, where she has directed the EAP and the TESOL MA Programs. She conducts classroom-oriented and corpus-based research on L2 writing in ESL and EFL contexts. She has written about pedagogical practices, teacher training, and language policy; the writing processes of multilingual writers; and CALL (specifically e-feedback). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Second Language Writing, System, Assessing Writing, the CALICO Journal, ELTJ, AJELT, ITL-International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and the Wiley Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, among others. |
