TESOL ITA-IS Steering Committee Minutes Wednesday, 22 May 2024
Present: Alissa Cohen, Sarah Emory, Laurie Frazier, Jenny Grill, Kayla Landers, Mike O’Neill, Mo Burke, Eva Miszoglad
NOTE: links shared in the meeting are listed at the end of this document.
Working with TESOL: Sarah noted that there is less for ISs to do in TESOL and this means we need to be more proactive in reaching out to our TESOL contacts: Nancy Flores and Raichle Farrelly ([email protected] Rai Farrelly)
Information Manager Role: Our IS needs an information manager to collect and curate resources and publications. This could be part of the secretary’s role or community events? We did not decide who would do this, but it’s clear that creating some kind of library or collection would be helpful for the ITA group.
Communication with ITA People: We need to make sure that we post on the ITA listserv and MyTESOL. We have members of the IS who might not be on the listerv and people on the listserv who might not be in TESOL. Also, although we are an active group, TESOL only sees what we post through MyTESOL. Thus, if we’re only posting in the listserv we appear to be less active and could eventually equal even less support from TESOL.
ITA Working Group and Webinars: The ITA working group got started in May 2020 before we had the role of community event organizer(s) in the IS. The group was a response to the pandemic when everyone had to teach exclusively online. We’ve maintained the group, but we are not as active as we were. The working group is something that anyone can organize and facilitate—we can meet when we have a topic of interest (such as pronunciation apps—Alissa and Jenny each facilitated Zoom calls on this topic). Regarding the recent pronunciation app sessions, the comment was made that while the notes are helpful, it would be good to add the names of people who have expertise with or knowledge of the apps (for possible follow-up with them later—they might be potential speakers for a webinar, etc.)
Webinars are more structured presentations that can be handled by the community events team for our IS. A webinar per semester is reasonable. One format that has worked well is to do an asynchronous video with a live follow-up session on Zoom a few weeks later. This gives people time to watch the presentation at their convenience.
Topics for Webinars, Intersection Session, Academic Session: Based on exit tickets from our open meeting at TESOL and a survey of the IS, topics include: AI and pronunciation, oral communication skills, assessment of ITAs (through AI, in general), sharing best practices of rubrics
learner comprehension of pragmatic language usage, training undergrads , faculty, staff to work with ITAs, teaching functional language, pronunciation: oral competence (more on suprasegmental level), accent, competency based design / Intelligibility approaches. (Mike also mentioned possible follow-up of Elena Cotos’ work presented at the ITA Symposium in 2020).
Intersection Session: working with the Intercultural Communication IS is a possibility (but what specific topic and/or experts are we looking for?) The Higher Ed IS is another possibility.
Aug. 1 is the deadline for the Intersection and Academic session proposals.
Links from the Meeting
IS Handbook
https://my.tesol.org/topics/23381/home
or try: https://my.tesol.org/topics/23381/media_center/file/7a62ea7e-371a-494b-a3ec-2097060410ba
ITA Working Group
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1oxRgpYGoLRLiNEsD0IsDUdW69e_lRlGm
ITA Working Group Notes from Past Working Groups
Resource: Audio Clip on Navigating Classroom Culture
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jB8iON5ZV4Q4B4JtkocqTNDok5PIJX2o/view?usp=share_link