From the Editors

Michael Lessard-Clouston, [email protected],
and Meredith Bricker, [email protected]

Greetings and welcome to another issue of the CETC Newsletter! We are delighted to share this issue with you and to update you on what is happening in the Christian Educators in TESOL Caucus. Over the summer and fall we have worked with various writers, and we are happy to present you with this issue, hopeful that it will provide useful information, lots of food for thought, and some ideas and insights for your work.

In This Issue

We begin the issue with updates from CETC leaders, including letters from the past chair, Karen Asenavage, and current chair, Eleanor Pease. As a caucus we mourn the loss of Dr. Jean Zukowski/Faust this past summer, and we are pleased to celebrate her life and work in a tribute written by former CETC Chair Wes Eby. You will also find guidelines for contributions to this newsletter, prepared especially for those of you who would like to put your fingers to the keyboard and send us something that could be considered for a future issue. This newsletter will only be as good as the contributions we receive, so we have provided those guidelines, but another indication of what we are interested in may be found in the contents of this issue. We have tried to balance articles we solicited from various people and others that interested CETC members have sent our way. We plan to have another issue in your inbox in February, before the TESOL convention in Seattle, so feel free to let us know if there are articles you have enjoyed or appreciated. [Please note: The deadline for us to receive draft articles for possible inclusion in the upcoming issue is January 2, 2007.] In conjunction with the convention, the CELT 2007 Conference will be held at Seattle Pacific University, and we are pleased to publish a notice about it from conference chair Kathryn Bartholomew. Finally, in this section we also have some news and updates from CETC.

In our articles section we have a strong and varied range of short and longer pieces, starting with an article by Tom Scovel on the honoring of an influential caucus member. Former CETC Newsletter editor Jim Mischler reports on the joint AAAL/CAAL 2006 conference in Montreal, and Rich Robison shares his reflections on truthfulness in English teaching, derived from his presentation during the CETC Colloquium at TESOL 2006 in Tampa. Also in this issue, Anna Vaughan reviews topics in the current SLA literature and presents a Christian perspective on second language learning, while David Bartsch outlines his reflections on two metaphors for language learning and teaching. Dayle Burkhart describes the development and revision of her HIS English curriculum, and Eleanor Pease writes about affect and motivation among Japanese ESL learners in her doctoral research. Finally, Leifur Sigurdsson reviews a new book on teaching academic vocabulary that will be of interest to both ESL and EFL teachers.

We are grateful to each of these authors for their contributions and thank them for sharing their work with us and you through this forum. We hope you will be encouraged and find something helpful for your life and work in TESOL. We would like this benefit of your TESOL membership to be a welcome addition to your professional reading. If you agree, please consider joining the conversation by letting us know what you think, by suggesting a topic or idea, or even by writing an article for us to consider publishing in a future issue.

Blessings,
Michael and Meredith