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Aloha, SLWIS colleagues!
I’m honored to introduce you to this issue of the SLW
News. The TESOL Second Language Writing Interest Section
(SLWIS) is one of the communities of practice in TESOL. At present, we
have 1,116 members on MyTESOL, our primary
discussion list which also includes access to archived materials and
other resources. We are eternally grateful for such an active, engaged
community of teachers, researchers, and students of second language
writing from across the globe. In this letter, I give you some updates
on what our interest section (IS) has done in the past 6 months as well
as some of the activities to look forward to.
Looking back to the 2019 TESOL Convention in Atlanta, our IS
was well represented with more than 150 sessions on the topic of
writing. Our academic session this year was a panel discussing issues of
response to writing, featuring presentations from Carol Severino, Todd
Ruecker, Kate Mangelsdorf, Estela Ene, Thomas Upton, Qiandi Liu, and Dan
Brown. We also hosted three writing-focused InterSections, which are
panel presentations organized jointly by two TESOL ISs. The topics for
this year were “Beyond 5-Paragraph Essays: Why Don’t Writing Textbooks
Reflect Current Research?” (with the Applied Linguistics IS), “Refugee
Writing Across the Lifespan” (with the Refugee Concerns IS), and
“Academic Writing Instruction for Bi/Multilingual Students” (with the
Bilingual-Multilingual Education IS).
We are continuing to run the book club we started last year.
During the spring and summer of 2019, we read and discussed Eli Hinkel’s
book Effective
Curriculum for Teaching L2 Writing and will soon
start reading our next book, Changing
Practices for the L2 Writing Classroom: Moving Beyond the
Five-Paragraph Essay, edited by SLWIS Former Chair
Nigel Caplan and Ann Johns. For this book, we will have several live
online sessions with the editors and some of the chapter authors in
which book club members can share their thoughts and discuss additional
issues not addressed in the book. To join the book club, send an email
to tesolslwisbookclub-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
or sign up for the Facebook
group.
We have continued to host webinars throughout the year. In May,
we hosted a session titled “A
More Just Campus for Multilingual Students,”organized by Brooke Ricker Schreiber and Eunjeong Lee,
chairs of the Conference on College Composition’s Second Language
Writing standing group, with presenters Norah Fahim, Jeroen Gevers,
Jennifer Johnson, Greer Murphy, Rachael Shapiro, Jenny Slinkard, and
Missy Watson. At the end of September, Cary Torres of Kapi‘olani
Community College presented a session on supporting English learners
with disabilities in writing. If you have ideas of sessions that might
be of interest to SLWIS members or presenters who could speak on those
topics, please let us know. We will announce future webinars in the
SLWIS MyTESOL group and post recordings to the TESOL YouTube
channel.
Looking ahead, we will soon be holding an election for
positions on the Interest Section Steering Committee, including positions for
incoming chair and at-large members. This is a great way to get involved
with our IS and help us decide the future of our group. Look for
information in the SLWIS MyTESOL emails. If you are attending the Symposium on Second Language
Writing in November, keep your eyes out for fellow TESOL SLWIS
members!
Mahalo (thank you) for continuing to make our IS strong and active. I hope you enjoy the newsletter!
All the best,
Betsy Gilliland (Chair, 2019–2020) |
