Dear Fellow SPLIS Members,

Greetings! We are proud to present our first graduate-student-oriented newsletter. We hope you find the work included from some of our newer members as inspiring as we have!

For those of you who were able to join us in 2011 at the annual convention, we also hope that you found it an invigorating experience. We were again impressed by the quality of presentations within SPLIS and want to congratulate you on your presentations.

Attending the convention can be a motivating and inspiring experience. The opportunity to meet other educators from around the world and share ideas with them always sparks a new flame within us. As we settle into spring, we hope that the new ideas and inspiration from the conference add excitement to your teaching and help you find new ways to help your students reach their learning goals.

With the quality and breadth of presentations we urge you to submit your work to the SPLIS newsletters in order to make it available to those who were not able to attend. We’ve also included abstracts from the presenters in case you would like to contact them for more information about their work.

Amanda Huensch is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working toward her degree in applied linguistics.

Carolyn Quarterman is an ESL lecturer at North Carolina State University.