Letter-from-the-Chair Draft

Dear NNESTIS Members,


I hope that 2010 has been a good year for all of you as it has been for our Interest Section (IS). Since this will be my last letter as Chair, I’d like to bring your attention to three key IS issues: IS elections and exiting IS officers, TESOL 2011 Academic Session and Intersessions with other ISs, and the NNEST-Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2011 Session.

Firstly, we are going to wrap this year with an election for the various Steering Committee (SC) positions for 2011-2012. I will be stepping down as Chair, and Icy Lee will take over as Chair for 2011-2012. Aya Matsuda and Ryuko Kubota (members-at-large officers) and Lifen Lin (our web manager) will also end their terms in March 2011. Candidates for these positions will be announced soon, and I’m hoping that we could have our elections before 2010 makes its final exit. To Aya, Ryuko, and Lifen, many many thanks for your help and support. Rashi Jain will continue on with her role as our Newsletter Editor, and (name of new volunteer insert here) will be the (name of position to be filled, insert here). Election results will be announced to the list and an official announcement will be made during our IS business meeting in New Orleans next March.

Secondly, for the 2011 TESOL convention in New Orleans, we will be working with SLWIS (with NNEST as primary), SPLIS (as secondary), and with TEIS & EFL ISs (as third), and the following NNEST-IS members will be representing our IS in these sessions:

NNEST-SLWIS Intersession: Icy Lee, Lisya Seloni, and Claus Gnutzmann
SPLIS-NNEST Intersession: Paul Sze, Katya Nemchinova
TEIS-EFL-NNEST Intersession: Isabela Villas Boas

Zoreh Eslami, Lia Kamhi-Stein, Lawrence Jun Zhang, and Donna Fujimoto will be joining me for our Academic Session.

Last but not least, we will be offering NNEST-EVO 2011 in January to kick-off a good year for NNEST teacher professional development. We have a roster of great guest speakers per week who will be leading the synchronous and asynchronous discussions. The speakers (see below) are experts in their own right and are quite well-known in the TESOL/ELT academic circle.

List of Confirmed-Speakers

1. Jeremy Harmer

2. Jeff Lebow

3. Yilin Sun

4. Isabela Villas Boas

5. Michael Carrier

6. Marisa Constantinides

7. Robert Griffin

8. Icy Lee

9. George Vassilakis

10. Masaki Oda

11. RELO Thailand

12. Rashi Jain

The thematic weekly discussions will cover a range of NNEST-related issues, which unfortunately despite the vast research conducted and published papers in these areas, the same concerns and dilemma still exist today. Links to the synchronous and asynchronous discussions will be announced by the end of December. This EVO session is definitely something you wouldn’t want to miss!

Thank you all and have a great new year!

Aiden Yeh