Journal of Southeast Asian Language Teaching
Volume 12, No. 2, Fall 2006

COTSEAL President's Message

Dear COTSEAL Members and Colleagues,

I hope this message finds you well.  It was just this past spring that our first online issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Language Teaching was posted.  Now our Fall 2006 issue is ready for you.  I hope that you are finding JSEALT useful and feel that the journal is moving in the right direction.  We welcome your comments and suggestions so that we can constantly improve upon it.

And now here is another volume for us to enjoy, another milestone to mark our professional journey.  With articles, book reviews, and some new features, the volume does us proud.  Many thanks to our contributors for their generosity in sharing their expertise with our members and colleagues!

With this issue, we would like to introduce to you our new JSEALT Forum on language teaching and learning, so that instead of being isolated from each other and totally immersed in our own immediate classroom(s), we can soon have the opportunity to exchange ideas with other language instructors across the country.  Rhodalyne Gallo-Crail of Northern Illinois University initially proposed this idea at our Editorial Board meeting this past summer.  We enthusiastically endorsed this new venture, and Rhodalyne agreed to organize and coordinate the JSEALT Forum. 

Our Forum is a place where we can post questions and get responses from colleagues and friends, benefiting from each other's unique experience and learning about all the various classroom techniques that are being employed, together with comments on how and when and at what level to apply them.

A case in point is the communicative approach that has been for some time considered superior to most other methodologies.  But what exactly does this approach involve?  Do we need a whole new set of materials for it?  How do we apply it if we decide to use the available texts?  Left on our own, we only know what this methodology means to us, but we do not have even the slightest inkling of how other colleagues interpret it and what they are doing with it, even though we may claim that we are doing precisely the same thing(s) for our students.

The list of possible topics for the Forum goes on and on; it could include discussion of the use of video clips, movies, technology, and innovative ideas to strengthen our teaching.  I am of the belief that this project may ultimately lead to, if there is some cooperation among us, the creation of a treasure trove of language resources and effective classroom activities that will constantly be available to both current and aspiring teachers of Southeast Asian languages.

Best regards,
Bac Hoai Tran,
University of California, Berkeley
COTSEAL President
bact@calmail.berkeley.edu

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