Letter From the Chair

Dear Colleagues in the Applied Linguistics Interest Section,

I am excited and honoured to be the Chair of the Applied Linguistics Interest Section (ALIS) of TESOL International Association, a wonderful organization, which offers many opportunities for professional development, collaboration, and research. TESOL International Association is the largest and most important organization that advances research, leadership, and professional development in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages. It consists of a vibrant community of more than 10,000 professionals from all over the world, which includes researchers, academics, teachers, administrators, and students.

I would like to thank Miriam Moore, ALIS Past Chair, for her effective leadership. I would also like to thank all our dedicated members for their ongoing commitment to this section and to TESOL International Association. 

I am delighted to announce the new ALIS leadership team:

• Chair: Andreea Cervatiuc

• Chair-Elect: Zahra Safdarian

• Past Chair: Miriam Moore

• Newsletter Editors: Andy Jiahao Liu, Curtis Green-Eneix

• Social Media Coordinators: Linda Merzougui, Fatemah Bordbarjavidi 

• Members-at-Large: Mimi Li, Wemimo Aluko

• Events Coordinators: Dan Zhou, Nabiha El Khatib

• Community Manager: Kaitlyn Forster

• Board Liaison: Misty Adoniou

I would also like to highlight our accomplishments at the TESOL International Convention in Salt Lake City. We organized several events: An interesting academic session, two exciting intersection sessions, an open meeting for ALIS members, a networking table, and a display and celebration of our interest section history. 

Our Academic Session at the TESOL 2026 International Convention & Expo, in Salt Lake City was titled Multimodal and Translingual Literacy: Concepts and Strategies for Pedagogy. In this session, I presented on multimodal language teaching, Neda Sahranavard looked at translanguaging and multimodal pedagogy in university-level Persian instruction, and Linda Molin-Karakoc focused on co-designing multi-semiotic L2 environments in refugee education. 

At the 2026 TESOL International Convention in Salt Lake City, ALIS hosted two exciting Intersection Sessions. The intersection session with the Second Language Writing Interest Section (SLWIS) was titled Supporting Multilingual Writers in Process-Oriented Pedagogies. As part of this panel, I focused on teaching second language writing through a constructivist approach. Julie Lake and Heather Weger presented on building accountability in second writing classrooms, and Davy Tran focused on academic writing.  

The intersection session with the Teacher Education Interest Section (TEIS) was titled Knowledge about Language for Preservice Teachers: The Conversation Continues. In this session, Bridget Schvarcz, Aimee Schoonmaker, Khanh Duc Kuttig, and Miriam Moore focused on ways in which teacher educators can integrate metalinguistic knowledge into curricula for preservice teachers.

It was a pleasure to meet some of our ALIS leadership team members and many TESOL-ers in person, in Salt Lake City. I was excited to meet our new Board Liaison, Misty Adoniou, who shared her wisdom and experiences. The 2026 TESOL International Convention, in the beautiful Salt Palace Convention Center, was truly an exhilarating and rewarding experience. 

During my tenure as ALIS Chair, I would like to focus on energizing and building ALIS to serve TESOL and our community members. I would also like to promote networking, collaboration, and scholarship for ALIS members, and highlight the contributions of our members to the field. 

I will oversee the organization of academic and inter-section sessions and of other exciting events at the TESOL 2026 Virtual Convention and at the TESOL 2027 International Convention & Expo, in Houston. I really look forward to these important conferences. I will also oversee the organization of a series of interesting webinars and engaging virtual coffee chats on interesting topics in Applied Linguistics. 

I would like to thank the members of the Applied Linguistics Interest Section for their dedication. I look forward to collaborating with you.

Sincerely,

Andreea Cervatiuc

ALIS Chair

Andreea Cervatiuc, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia in Canada and the Program Coordinator of an online Master of Education in TESL. Her research focuses on online graduate education for teachers, multilingual and multimodal approaches to TESOL, critical language assessment, and language curriculum.