Letter from the Editor
Lan Wang-Hiles, West Virginia State University, Institute, USA
Dear PAIS Colleagues and TESOL Friends:
Greetings! I hope everyone started off the Fall semester successfully. I am excited to introduce the two authors of our PAIS newsletter articles for the PAIS Fall 2025 issue. They are impactful and seasoned TESOL and ELT leaders, program administrators, and language practitioners in our TESOL community: Mr. Yoseph F. Sahle, based in Ethiopia, is President of the Ethiopian English Language Professionals’ Association (EELPA) and Chairman of the Africa Lake Zone English Language Consortium (ALZELC); Dr. Elise E. Paredes, based in USA, is Director of Virginia Tech Language and Culture Institute (LCI). In their articles, they shared their leadership trajectories as well as their strategies of keeping language programs grow and sustaining when facing challenges especially during the current try time. In their articles they also shared achievements and exciting moments in their professional lives and under their leaderships. Reading their experiences will enable many language program administrators, ELT leaders, and program policy holders to learn how to successfully deal with challenges and develop ELT programs. Their invaluable, unique, and rich insights would benefit a broader and large audience members in the TESOL community. Readers who are ELT leaders will be inspired and who are interested in becoming a language program administrator will gain new ideas. Through these two dedicated educators’ perspectives, we can gain an overall picture of the English language educational landscape. As the editor, I would also like to say “thank you” to the current PAIS Chair, Mr. Alemayehu Anberbir for his unwavering assistance throughout. Without his support, we will not have these two articles for this issue.
Since November 2023 I became the PAIS newsletter editor, I have published four issues of the newsletter (Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025, and Fall 2025). During my tenure as the editor, I have the opportunities to connect and contact with many TESOLers, language program administrators, language education researchers and leaders, and ELT policy makers. It has truly been a learning experience for me. Here, I would like to sincerely thank each of and all the authors I have worked with in the past two years. Thank you all for sharing your insights and supporting PAIS. I would also like to take a moment to express my gratefulness to all the PAIS Chairs and team workers. Thanks for your trust and support.
That being said, this Fall 2025 PAIS newsletter is the last issue edited by me. I am confident our incoming newsletter editor will do a better job and keep this PAIS newsletter a useful resource for language program administrators. I encourage and invite language program administrators, TESOL experts and leaders, both domestically and globally, to continue sharing your experiences and perspectives, contributing your insight into language program administration, and supporting the PAIS newsletter. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Lan Wang-Hiles
PAIS Newsletter Editor
Lan Wang-Hiles is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia State University, where she established and directed the ESL Program. Her research interests include second language writing, writing center theory and multilingual tutoring practice, multilingualism, and non-native English-speaking teacher identity. Her studies have been published as journal articles and book chapters in these fields. She is the newsletter editor of the Program Administration Interest Section (PAIS) for TESOL, a Board member of West Virginia TESOL as a higher education representative, and Chair of the Non-Native English-Speaking Writing Instructors (NNESWIs) Standing Group for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).