Greetings, SLWIS Members!

We would like to welcome you to this pre-convention issue of SLW News. The 2018 TESOL Convention in Chicago is only a few weeks away, and as always, it will bring many exciting sessions and professional development opportunities. While at the Convention, you can stay connected with other attendees through social media by using hashtags #TESOL18 and #myTESOL18 and by joining the TESOL Convention event on Facebook. You can find other sessions on various topics related to SLW through your desktop planner or mobile app by going to TESOL 2018 and selecting “Full Schedule” under “Agenda.” From there, you can type “second language writing” in the search bar or select the “Track” tab on the left and check the “second language writing” box.

If you are not attending the Convention, we encourage you to stay connected with other SLWIS fellow attendees via our Facebook page. We currently have 5223 followers and are growing!

For those who won’t be able to attend TESOL 2018, we offer regular webinars on various topics in L2 writing. These webinars are led by notable professionals in the field. Recent webinar topics included L2 classroom writing assessment (led by Dr. Deborah Crusan), SLW feedback (led by Dr. Dana Ferris), teaching effective summarizing (led by Dr. Ann Johns), and teaching to read as a writer (led by Dr. Christine Tardy). Stay tuned to the SLW-IS community page for upcoming webinars.

In this pre-convention issue, SLWIS Chair Nigel Caplan will provide an overview of convention sessions sponsored by our interest section and a list of SLWIS meetings. You can also read this TESOL blog for more details on professional and social opportunities offered by SLWIS at the Convention. We will surely have many such events, and we hope you will be able to join us! If you have a busy conference schedule, you can join us for the social event, which will take place at Tapas Valencia on Wednesday March 28, after the Open Meeting.

This issue also features three main articles, a book review, and a new profile in our regular Graduate Student spotlights section.

• Zuzana Tomaš and Jennifer Mott-Smith offer suggestions for making writing instruction more meaningful and engaging for students.

• Mariam Alamyar discusses how writing instructors can help their students compose texts for broader audiences in a digital writing project.

• Thu M. Lau describes five steps for designing a lesson plan to teach academic writing from a genre-based approach.

• Anna Davis shares a lesson plan that teachers can use to help students compose a narrative essay.

• Shyam B. Pandey reviews the recent volume “Professionalizing second language writing” (Matsuda, Snyder, & O’Meara, 2017), which discusses a wide range of L2 writing issues such as research, publication, and professional development opportunities.

Finally, in our regular section, Graduate Student Spotlights, we feature Hannah Soblo, an L2 writing graduate student from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. We love to hear 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 resources 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 would like to extend our gratitude to the authors and the editorial team members for their invaluable contributions and hard work on this issue. We also encourage you to share your teaching and research insights with the SLWIS community in the next issue of SLW News, which will be published in October 2018. The deadline for submissions to this issue is June 30. For more information, please have a look at the Submission Guidelines in this issue.

Happy reading!

Sincerely,

Elena and Ilka (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