Letter from the Chairs

Larry Zwier, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
Hetal Ascher, WIDA, Austin, Texas, USA

Happy New Year, everyone! This is always a wild time of year as we try to rebound from the holidays and pick up all the projects we’ve let slide. This year we’ve had to digest an especially large helping of disorienting events—and that’s not even counting the Gulf Coast Blizzard.

But we have TESOL Long Beach to look forward to—March 18-21. As we did last year, RVIS members have stepped forward with some important contributions to the event. Let us highlight a couple of them.

The RVIS’s official Academic Session this year will be:

“Vocabulary Richness: Why it’s Important and How to Promote It” (Session # 2804)

Thursday, 20 March, 9-10:15 a.m.

Seaview Ballroom C at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach Hotel

This will be a panel session that Larry will moderate. His panelmates will be Prof. Randi Reppen (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ) and Prof. Colin Ward (Lone Star Community College, Houston, TX). Many of you will recognize their names, because they have both been prominent in TESL/TEFL for many years. Prof. Reppen is the creator and lead author of the series Grammar and Beyond from Cambridge University Press. She has also been prominent as a researcher into using corpora in ESL/EFL teaching. Prof. Ward is well known as an author in the Q: Skills for Success series (Pearson). Many of you may know him from several other sessions at TESOL, where he has been a prolific presenter.

Larry knows both Randi and Colin very well, and he predicts we will have a hugely entertaining and informative session.

Just FYI, Larry is an invited speaker at TESOL this year. His talk about vocabulary learning will be (Session 2985) is “Current Thinking about Instructed and Incidental Vocabulary Learning.”

In addition to the academic session, RVIS will be collaborating with the Teacher Education Interest Section to present the intersection

“The Art and Science of Reading Instruction”

Friday, 21 March, 10:00 AM-11:15 AM

The intersection is a panel discussion with teacher educators and teachers. It will explore the idea of reading to learn and learning to read. Panelists will share useful strategies that contribute to vocabulary development, increased reading speed and general language proficiency and provide ideas for how to develop these teaching skills with pre-service teachers.

Hetal also has a presentation focused on teaching K-12 learners called Expanding Reading Instruction for Multilingual Learners on Friday, 21 March, 12:00-12:45 PM

Also, please mark your calendars for the RVIS Open Business Meeting, Wednesday, March 19, 2025, from 2:00 to 3:00 pm. We haven’t yet been informed of the venue for that meeting; check the TESOL Program when the time comes. Please ask your friends to come with you to this meeting and get familiar with the Interest Section. We are always eager to make new friends and would be deleted if some new people decided to join us.

Lastly, The RVIS is eager to recruit three new members for our leadership team:

1) Incoming Chair – Our current incoming chair, Hetal Ascher, will be stepping up into the Chair position as of March. We have not yet found another person who could get in line for a two-year stint as incoming chair to learn the ropes under Hetal and then become the new chair two years from now. TESOL has promised to help us recruit for these positions, but nothing works better than the persuasion of friends. Please encourage your talented friends to try their hand at section leadership. It’s more fun than it sounds like, and the service from our leaders is what keeps RVIS vibrant.

2) Co-editor of the newsletter-- One of our faithful newsletter co-editors, Christy Williams, is rotating out of that spot as her term expires. Alisha Biler continues as the other co-editor She would be very happy if one of our members stood up to fill the opening left by Christy’s term expiration. By the way, we want to thank Christy for her excellent work and her enthusiasm for the mission of RVIS.

3) Community Manager – Since Alisha Biler stepped up as co-editor of the newsletter, we have had no one on the leadership team to organize our social media presence and maintain continual outreach to members.

Thanks to you all, and I look forward to seeing you at TESOL in Long Beach.

Larry Zwier is a professor at Michigan State University and has been teaching for the past 3 decades. He has lived and taught abroad and is an active member of TESOL. He has written several ESL/EFL textbooks.

Hetal Ascher is a professional learning specialist at WIDA with over ten years of experience both in the US and abroad, as a teacher and EL coordinator. She has volunteered with TESOL in various capacities including serving on an interest section steering committee and writing regular posts for the TESOL blog.