Greetings SLWIS Members,

Welcome to the March 2017 preconvention issue of SLW News. The 2017 Convention is just around the corner, and many of us have been busy preparing our workshops, presentations, schedules, and travel plans. This year, the SLWIS is pleased to once again have a booth in the Exhibit Hall. Spending time at our booth provides members excellent opportunities to network, converse with colleagues from around the world, and promote the SLWIS. We must have our booth staffed for a minimum number of hours, so please sign up for a slot. While you are at the convention, you can also connect with fellow attendees via social media using hashtags #TESOL17 and #myTESOL17 and by joining the TESOL Convention event on Facebook. The convention app and planner can help you stay organized as you make your way around the convention, specifically allowing you to search for sessions related to SLW.

In this issue, Chair Ryan Miller discusses SLWIS events in Seattle, ways to engage in the IS throughout the year, and changes in SLWIS leadership. One of the events that he highlights is the annual Friends of SLW event, which will take place in Seattle on Wednesday, 22 March after the SLWIS open meeting. This year’s social will be held at the Tap House Grill, which is a few blocks away from the convention center. We encourage all SLWIS members to join us there!

This issue features articles to inform your SLW practices; the three articles featured at this time describe preparing L2 writers for future STEM-based writing tasks, using a creative writing task to help L2 writers become confident in their writing, and reflecting on the dynamics of teacher-student relationships in writing conferences. We hope that readers will find fresh ideas that they can use in their writing classrooms. This issue also features an interview with Professor Alister Cumming, which is part of our Meet the Expert series. In this interview, our Community Manager Elena Shvidko talks with Professor Cumming about the opening plenary he gave at the 2016 Symposium on Second Language Writing, which focused on the notion of expertise in second language writing. The Graduate Student Spotlights section features two graduate students: Shyam B. Pandey of Minnesota State University and Zhaozhe Wang of Purdue University. If you are a master’s or doctoral student and interested in sharing a little bit about yourself, please contact Elena for more information. We are always interested in hearing from our graduate student SLWIS members!

Finally, the issue includes a review of a newly published textbook, University Success Writing, Transition Level, with MyEnglishLab. If you recently read a book or textbook about second language writing, consider reviewing it for SLW News. You may contact Steven Bookman for more information about book reviews.

As always, we thank all of the authors and editors who have contributed to this issue and worked with us during the editing process. We hope you consider sharing your teaching and/or research insights with our SLWIS community in our next issue, which will be published in October. The deadline for submissions to this issue is 30 June. For more information about article guidelines, please visit our Submission Guidelines.

Happy reading!

Sincerely,

Ilka (on behalf of the editorial team)

SLW News Editorial Staff

Gena Bennett
Steven Bookman
Adam Clark
Ming Fang
Joel Heng Hartse
Helena Hall
Kristina Lauer
Peggy Lindsey
Elena Shvidko