March 2011
LEADERSHIP UPDATE
FROM THE EDITORS
Margi Wald, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Catherine Smith, University of Minnesota, Morris, USA
Suzan Stamper, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, USA

Welcome to the second issue of the SLW-CALL InterSection newsletter.

At annual TESOL conventions, special sessions called InterSections "highlight topics of relevance to and across interest sections, providing a collaborative forum for attendees seeking innovative and cross-disciplinary approaches and solutions." At TESOL 2010, the Second Language Writing (SLW) and Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Interest Sections collaborated on an InterSection titled "Re-imagining L2 Writing in a Digitized World" that highlighted new directions and possibilities for teaching L2 writing in a digitized world.

Given the popularity of this topic, SLW and CALL decided to continue this discussion through an issue of our InterSection newsletter. Articles in this issue examine how new technologies are reshaping how we teach in a variety of academic settings. The articles by Paul Matsuda (“Voice in Digital Discourse”) and Deborah Crusan (“The Machine Scoring of Essays”) summarize presentations at TESOL 2010. New submissions focus on corpus-based grammar instruction (book review by Robert Poole), a computer-based listen-to-write language teaching approach (Qingsong Gu et al.), and Web 2.0 applications (Mary Hillis).

We hope that our members, and other interested readers within TESOL, will enjoy this edition of our InterSection newsletter and our celebration of second language writing and computer-assisted language-learning connections.


Margi Wald, SLWIS Newsletter Editor, mwald@berkeley.edu

Catherine Smith, SLWIS CALL Column Editor, casmith@umn.edu

Suzan Stamper, CALLIS Newsletter Co-editor, stampers@iupui.edu