Shannon McCrocklin, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, USA
Matthias Maunsell, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama, USA |
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Dear Readers,
We are pleased to present the latest issue of As We Speak. Although we believe that the global outlook is improving with the development and distribution of vaccines for COVID-19, we recognize the heavy impact the virus has had on our community. In addition to dealing with the effects on their personal lives, many of our community found themselves venturing into online teaching for the first time or pursuing professional development through virtual conferences in 2020.
As many teachers continue to explore options for reaching and supporting learning in online environments, we hope that this issue, which focuses on adapting speaking, listening, and pronunciation activities to the online environment, will support our community in navigating online options for teaching. The issue opens with a beneficial article by Stacy Suhadolc and Dave Sandor who outline steps to create online learning modules, explain their ongoing project for an ITA pronunciation course, and provide tips and resources for instructors to begin building their own modules. This is followed by Sarah Seymour’s essay which dives into the research supporting use of the fluency activity often called the 4/3/2 and provides ideas for adapting the activity to online teaching. The final article by Marla Tritch Yoshida provides innovative and fun ideas to transform pronunciation activities for online learning along with useful tools to support pronunciation learning online. The newsletter closes with an interview in the “In Conversation” section with Randall Davis, who shares insight based on his experiences teaching speaking and listening, focusing on what he has learned from facilitating ESL listening instruction online.
We would like to gratefully acknowledge the Speech, Pronunciation, and Listening Interest Section membership and leadership team for support in bringing this issue forward and take a moment to recognize the work of our current chair, Sinem Sonsaat-Hegelheimer, and past chairs in providing leadership to this community. We look forward to the upcoming TESOL Convention to be held virtually from March 23rd to March 27th and hope that we will have the chance to continue learning from this community through both conference talks and online webinars in the upcoming months. We also hope that those of you with ongoing projects will consider submitting your work to the newsletter. We encourage submissions for articles, book or technology reviews, as well as nominations for future interviewees. The deadline to submit for consideration in the next issue is June 27th, 2021.
Warm wishes,
Shannon & Matthias |
