Dear fellow SPLIS members,

What a busy spring and summer this has been! We hope you have had some time to relax and recharge this summer before you launch into a new school year this fall.

It was good to see many of you at the TESOL conference in Philadelphia and we enjoyed many wonderful presentations related to listening, speaking, and pronunciation. Fortunately, several presenters agreed to submit articles for this newsletter so that even more members of our interest group can benefit.

In this issue are articles covering a wide variety of topics including incorporating World Englishes into listening materials, using drama as a way to promote authentic communication, ideas for teaching small talk, a principled framework for teaching pronunciation to ITAs, how to better use music as a tool for teaching pronunciation, and an investigation of Korean English language learner final consonant use and teaching pronunciation in an EFL context. What a wonderful variety to represent our group! We hope you will be inspired to try some new ideas or activities in your classes this fall.

As always, we encourage you to submit an article in the future if you have some research results or ideas to share. We would love to hear from you!