Good heavens, yet another year has passed in the blink of an eye and we are now enjoying what is left of summer 2014. This third issue under my guidance as VDMIS post-conference newsletter editor is just popping onto your screen now. The big news is that Kenneth Chyi is once more firmly back in the saddle as a newsletter editor, too, and will be aptly handling the preconference issue as well as perhaps a late autumn issue if contributions merit putting out an extra newsletter. Welcome Kenneth! We are grateful that you are bringing your long expertise to bear for the benefit of VDMIS.

As always, it has been such a joy to work with the writers in this issue. They are a most efficient, professional, passionately dedicated group of contributors and have collaborated patiently with me over many revisions to polish and format their articles and reports to a sterling level. I hope you will enjoy and benefit from their hard work and the many excellent ideas they are sharing with you here within.

As for me, after having worked 17 years as a full-time professor at Ibaraki University in Japan, I have retired and was given the status of Professor Emerita, to my great surprise and joy. Prior to becoming one of the editors for this VDMIS newsletter, I was a member of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT), and, for more than 15 years, was coeditor of a four-page monthly column in The Language Teacher. I am now teaching a variety of part-time EFL classes at three universities. I take ballet classes in my free time and enjoy the company of foreign and Japanese friends alike. Whenever possible, I travel around Japan and, this May, I discovered incredible Hirosaki City in the north with its gorgeous castle at cherry blossom time. You can always glance at my picture in other issues if interested, but I think you might rather enjoy my photo of the Hirosaki castle and probably find more pleasure in that than in my mug shot.

Please enjoy this issue, and, until we meet again in the 2015 post-conference issue, I wish you a very productive and satisfying year. Preconference editor Kenneth Chyi will be sending out invitations to solicit short reports and longer articles by the 4 January deadline. If interested, why not contact him sooner rather than later?

We hope to see you all at the next TESOL conference in Toronto, Canada on 25–28 March 2015. You are warmly encouraged to introduce yourself to us all, invited to attend our meetings, enjoy our presentations, and take an active part in our group. Hoping to meet you there!

Finally, in VDMIS, we all wish to thank Laurie Williams for her energy, flexibilty and patience in helping us to format and upload this newsletter which would not look as good as it does without her expertise.

All my best,

Joyce Cunningham

                        Hirosaki City castle (built in 1611), Aomori, Japan.