SLWIS Newsletter - June 2023 (Plain Text Version)
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LEADERSHIP UPDATES LETTER FROM THE PAST CHAIR Estela Ene, Indiana University Indianapolis, IN, USA
A Year of Increased Dialogue and Diversity: Reflections on my Year as Chair As I finish my tenure as the Chair of the SLW-IS and transition to the supporting role of Past Chair, I find myself reflecting on the achievements and challenges of the past year. It has been a true privilege to continue to serve this community, and I look forward to staying involved. As reflected in the myTESOL platform, our community has reached a membership of almost 1,500 in 2022-2023. Since the COVID pandemic, access from EFL contexts has improved. This is a remarkable and hopefully long-lasting outcome. It was an honor to have the opportunity to experiment with recruitment strategies - ranging from the creation of outreach videos to membership pricing - brainstormed at TESOL leaders’ meetings. In the post-COVID era, the TESOL organization has initiated significant changes. A new strategic plan was released which prioritizes membership access and improved operations. A new format was experimented with for the annual convention itself: TESOL 2023 occurred both in person in Portland, Oregon between March 20-25, 2023, and online between April 3-5, 2023. Finally, the TESOL website was revamped and a new online platform for the communities of practice is just about to be launched. As SLW-IS chair, I intentionally pursued two goals for the TESOL SLW-IS. I wanted to bring our community exposure to a wide range of current SLW topics by both experienced and junior scholars in SLW. It is important for us to introduce new approaches and voices to our community of practice while remaining connected to our foundations. In 2022-2023, I had the pleasure to host the webinar “Vocabulary and SLW” with David Hirsh (University of Sydney, Australia); an online book club discussion about “SLW in transitional spaces” with Lubie Alatriste (CUNY); an online book club on “International perspectives on creative writing in second language education” with Bee Chamcharastri (University of New Mexico) and Atsushi Iida (Aoyama Gakuin University); and a webinar on “Using an A-W of academic literacy in teaching and advising” with M.J. Curry (University of Rochester) and her student co-authors. These invited talks were based on recently published books. Tens of community members attended these discussions live or continue to access the recordings posted on our YouTube channel. Thanks to the steering committee for their input and participation at the webinars, and – of course – many thanks to the speakers and members who participated. Another important goal I had for our community was to strengthen and expand the relationship between the TESOL SLW-IS and our counterpart at the CCCC, the SLW Standing Group. To this end, I attended the business meeting of the SLW-SG at CCCC in Chicago, IL, at the invitation of Zhaozhe Wang (University in Toronto) and Shawna Shapiro (Middlebury College) (co-chairs of the CCCC SLW-SG). Together with colleagues from IUPUI, I also gave a keynote presentation at the SLW SG Workshop In return, I invited Shawna Shapiro to attend the open meeting of the TESOL SLW-IS. At these meetings, we led our communities through a discussion about how we have been collaborating and how we could continue collaborating more to elevate the profile of SLW and writing studies knowledge in both communities, for the benefit of both. We acknowledged that our IS and SG have been trying to stay in dialogue throughout the translingual debate, and that we aim to continue to do so. We set common goals to share expertise at upcoming TESOL and CCCC conferences, as well as to pursue projects on linguistic justice and inclusivity, writing teacher and professional development, and materials design. As always, a major highlight of the year’s work is the TESOL convention. I represented our community at the in-person convention at the TESOL Fair, Networking Meeting, and Open Meeting. In addition to giving an invited talk on “Internationalizing the (L2) writing curriculum,” I brought together a successful academic session on “Perspectives on Critical Language Awareness: Theory and practice” that featured Shawna Shapiro (Middlebury College), Kimberly Helmer (University of California Santa Cruz), and Parva Panahi (Metro State University). The speakers delved into the meaning and history of CLA (Shapiro), and presented applications of CLA to classroom practice through the use of language landscape projects (Helmer) as well as to teacher training (Panahi). Our community also played the primary organizer role in a collaboration with the Materials Writers IS. Three global speakers presented on “SLW Materials for adult education, ESP, and academic integrity.” From this session, the audience learned principles of designing SLW materials that support academic integrity (Salim Razi, institution), the development of writing skills for adult learners in the workplace (Joe Vance, Goodwill Industries), and principles for SLW materials design (Scott Douglas, University of British Columbia). Last but not least, we were happy to get together at the Friends of SLW social organized with Todd Ruecker in Portland. Although my role as Chair is coming to an end, my commitment to the SLW-IS community remains steadfast. I look forward to staying connected and supporting the incoming chair and the entire community. I encourage each of you to stay involved, share your ideas, and continue to help shape the future of the SLW-IS and TESOL organization. Sincerely, Estela Ene, Ph.D. Professor, Chair of the English Department, Director of the EAP Program Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis
Estela Ene is a Professor and Chair of English at Indiana University - Indianapolis, where she has directed the EAP and the TESOL MA Programs. She conducts classroom-oriented and corpus-based research on L2 writing in ESL and EFL contexts. She has written about pedagogical practices, teacher training, and language policy; the writing processes of multilingual writers; and CALL (specifically e-feedback). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Second Language Writing, System, Assessing Writing, the CALICO Journal, ELTJ, AJELT, ITL-International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and the Wiley Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, among others. |
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