Dear SLWIS Community,

I hope that this message finds you well. It was good to see everyone in Portland for a vibrant conference with a variety of interesting sessions. Our annual meeting had strong attendance, and we had some productive discussions about the future of the IS based on the results of the membership survey we conducted last fall. In particular, we are 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 looking to offer a webinar or two this next year. To this end, I will be approaching some members who submitted workshop proposals for the Toronto convention about the possibility of turning these into webinars.

For the upcoming convention in Toronto, we had 264 proposals, continuing our trend to increase this number every year. Research- and practice-based presentations continued to be by far the most popular type of submission, and we had a number of strong workshop proposals in response to our call for more of these. We are allotted program slots based on the number of submissions, so it’s important to keep increasing our numbers so SLW has more space in the program. This year we were able to accept 48 proposals (up from 46 last year) in addition to six poster sessions and two roundtable sessions. This means the overall acceptance rate was around 21%, a number that increased to 33% for roundtable exchanges and 46% for poster proposals.

Because I sought to balance research- and practice-based presentations along with workshops, teaching tips, and discussion groups, the research- and practice-based categories were the most competitive. Each proposal was reviewed by three people; thanks to the volunteer labor of a large number of reviewers. Although the decision has been received with mixed feelings among our members, I continue to support TESOL’s decision to have reviewer training and would like to see annual required norming for reviewers to ensure that every proposal gets a fair review. While the process has improved, there were a number of proposals that had two high-scoring reviews along with one very low one, something that speaks to the value of having three reviewers as well as improving the norming process.

I invite you to continue to stay active on the e-list this fall, sharing resources with one another. Our outgoing chair, Gena Bennett, will be facilitating the election process, so I encourage people to nominate others or themselves for open positions. Recently, our excellent new community manager Elena Shvidko created an SLWIS Facebook page, so if you are on Facebook, I encourage you to get online and connect in that space.

Finally, I would like to thank Margi Wald and the rest of the newsletter team for putting together another great issue. Creating this resource is labor intensive but, as evidenced in our survey results, an important service to the SLW community at TESOL.

Deborah Crusan, Ann Wintergerst, Dudley Reynolds, and Margi Wald at the SLWIS Booth at TESOL 2014