Letter From the Past Chair

Dear Colleagues,

I want to extend my gratitude to our Applied Linguistics Leadership Team for a fantastic year of learning and networking, and I want to welcome our new chair, Dr. Andreea Cervatiuc, and our chair-elect, Dr. Zahra Safdarian. I look forward to their leadership in the coming year.

I would like to celebrate some of the accomplishments of our team over the past year. First, under the leadership of Nabiha Khatib and Dan Zhou, we hosted three coffee chats and five webinars. Recordings of our webinars are available on MyTESOL for anyone to watch. Through each event, we endeavored to provide a platform where members can share their research and teaching projects. Given the success of the webinars over the past several months, Dan and Nabiha are planning a new series for this coming fall. If you have an idea for a webinar to share, please complete the interest form here.  

Another project that Nabiha and Dan have undertaken is the ALIS Research Network. Whether just getting started or writing an article for publication, all of us can benefit from dedicated spaces for writing and collaboration. In our network, we will work together to refine research questions, implement projects, analyze results, draft articles, and publish our findings. At our launch meeting in May, we will hear from the authors of a study published in the Applied Linguistics Forum last year. Kurt Sebnem and her co-authors from Iowa State University will discuss how their article, (How) Can I Tell If ChatGPT Wrote My Students’ Assignments?, moved from an idea to research to publication. After their presentation, we will break into small groups to talk about ideas, current projects, and the support needed to implement or complete research projects.  

Our newsletter, The Applied Linguistics Forum, offers a tremendous opportunity for both novice and experienced researchers to share their work. Many thanks to Andy Jiahao Liu and Curtis Green-Eneix for their work on this publication venue over the past year. I would also like to thank Linda Merzougui and Fatemeh Bordbarjavidi for promoting our newsletter, coffee chats, and webinars through social media, and also Katelyn Forster, who manages our community on MyTESOL.

I also want to congratulate a former chair, Rashad Ahmed, who was named TESOL’s Teacher of the Year for 2026, and our events coordinator, Dan Zhou, who won the TESOL Leadership Mentoring Program award.

Finally, I want to highlight our three sponsored sessions at TESOL 2026 in Salt Lake City. Our academic panel, Multimodal and Translingual Literacy: Concepts and Strategies for Pedagogy, featured Andreea Cervatiuc, Neda Sahranavard, and Linda Molin-Karakoc. This session offered rich resources for encouraging students to use a range of semiotic resources as they create meaning. Next, in a collaboration with the Second Language Writing Interest Section, we learned about how we might re-imagine process-based writing instruction, from implementation to assessment. This panel featured Andreea Cervatiuc, Davy Tran, Julie Lake, and Heather Weger.   Finally, we hosted an intersection panel with the Teacher Educator Interest Section. In this session, I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion with Aimee Schoonmaker, Khan Duc-Kuttig, and Bridget Scharcz. We explored how much metalinguistic knowledge preservice teachers need and how to introduce such knowledge—from a grammar-focused module to grammatical constructs infused throughout a broader syllabus.  

As we move towards the summer, I encourage members of our interest section to be involved: submit proposals for TESOL 2027, volunteer to review proposals, write a book review or feature article for our newsletter, join the Research Network, or send an idea for a webinar.  

Working with the leadership of the Applied Linguistics Interest section over the past year has been a pleasure and an honor. I thank all of you for giving me that opportunity.  

Sincerely, 

Miriam Moore

Miriam Moore is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia in Gainesville, Georgia, where she teaches undergraduate courses in writing, linguistics, and ESOL pedagogy. Her research interests include multilingual writing across the curriculum, metalinguistic awareness, online pedagogy, and written feedback.