Dear Readers,

Happy new year! We look forward to another productive and engaging year in our second language writing community and welcome you to this pre-convention issue of SLW News.

As you know, the TESOL 2019 Convention is just around the corner, and as always, it will offer lots of great sessions and professional development opportunities. We hope to see many of you in Atlanta. If you are attending the Convention, please consider joining us for the annual SLWIS Open Meeting, which will be held on March 13th, 2019, from 5:00 PM-6:30 PM in the Hickory Room at Omi Hotel at the CNN Center. During the meeting, you will hear about the latest updates and various opportunities to contribute to the development of our professional community. Per tradition, we will also have an informal social event immediately following the Open Meeting. Details will be sent to members via email and posted on the SLWIS Facebook page. If you are not able to attend the Convention, we encourage you to stay connected with other SLWIS fellow attendees via our Facebook page. We currently have 5,322 followers and are growing!

In this pre-convention issue of SLW News, SLWIS Chair Tanita Saenkhum provides an overview of convention sessions that are sponsored by our interest section. The issue also features three main articles, a book review, and a new profile in our regular Graduate Student Spotlights section.

• Patrick Randolph describes three unorthodox prewriting activities teachers can implement in their writing classes.

• Karla Coca addresses the issue of praise in teacher written feedback.

• Catherine Showalter describes one technique for peer review and offers suggestions to writing instructors on how to make it more effective.

• Melinda Harrison reviews the recent volume “Collaborations & Innovations: Supporting Multilingual Writers across Campus Units” (DeJoy & Quarshie Smith, 2017), which describes the ways post-secondary departments can collaborate and innovate to better serve second language writers.

Finally, our regular section, Graduate Student Spotlights, features Elif Burhan-Horasanlı, a graduate student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. We always enjoy hearing from graduate students, so if you are a master’s or doctoral student and would like to contribute to this section of SLW News, please contact Elena Shvidko for more information.

We are always interested in hearing your insights about the pedagogical and research materials you are using in your professional activities, so if you have recently read a book on L2 writing or used an L2 writing textbook in your class, consider reviewing it for SLW News. For more information about book reviews, contact Steven Bookman.

As always, we encourage you to submit an article to SLW News. The next issue will be published in October 2019. For more information, please have a look at the Submission Guidelines in this issue.

Thank you for reading!

Sincerely,
Elena and Ilka
SLW News Managing Co-editors (on behalf of the editorial team)

SLW News Editorial Staff

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