Dear Fellow SPLIS Members,

We hope that your new year has gotten off to a good start and you are ready for another year of sharing and learning new ideas and strategies for teaching speaking, listening, and pronunciation.

We are excited to share with you the first issue of our 10th volume of As We Speak. This issue includes a lot of exciting work! We are fortunate to have an article related to teaching listening, one exploring the effects of emphasis and rhythm on communicative competency, one on the teaching of pronunciation to Arabic learners, and last, but certainly not least, one on a useful method to track pronunciation progress.

We hope to see many of you in person at this year’s international TESOL convention in Dallas. If you attend, please come to the SPLIS open meeting on Thursday evening to meet or catch up with other members and have some input into topics you’d like to see explored at future conventions.

As always, we would also like to encourage you to share your work with other SPLIS members by submitting an article to the newsletter. If you’re presenting at the convention, publishing an article in the newsletter can be a great way to reach members who were unable to attend. For more information, please see the call for submissions in the final section of the newsletter.

Finally, we would like to announce that Carolyn Quarterman will be stepping down this year as a coeditor of the newsletter, and Lauren Waters will be the new coeditor to replace her. Lauren Waters currently teaches at West Georgia Technical College. Her interest in pronunciation began her first semester of graduate school, and since then she has taught several student workshops and presented at various conferences on the topic. We are excited to welcome her to the SPLIS leadership. Lauren, thank you so much for volunteering to help with the newsletter that makes it possible for our members to share their research and ideas!

Amanda Huensch and Carolyn Quarterman

Amanda Huensch is a PhD candidate in applied linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Carolyn Quarterman is an ESL lecturer at North Carolina State University.