21ST:You were elected to the TESOL presidency this January and are the first non-native English speaker to be President of TESOL in its 40-year history. What factors do you think make you stand out from the majority of native-speaking ELT experts in TESOL?
Liu:It was 2:30 a.m. on January 12 in China when I received a call from the TESOL Central Office informing me of the TESOL election results. I was pleasantly surprised and not surprised when I learned that I was the incoming TESOL president-elect. I was surprised because I will become the first non-native English speaker in TESOL (NNEST) to be President-elect in TESOL’s 40-year history; I was not surprised to learn that our TESOL membership has faith in electing a NNEST to be their president, which marks the era that NNEST rests and rises from within the profession, and our membership has come to the understanding that we are all professionals, and we are equal. However, such an understanding does not come easily. It has taken TESOL almost 40 years since its birth to elect a NNEST as their president.
There are several factors that made me stand out. One of them is my visibility in the profession. I have been very active in the field for more than a dozen years, and I have organized and presented numerous papers and colloquia at TESOL annual conventions. I have conducted research and published a number of them in TESOL Quarterly, the leading journal in the field. Moreover, I co-founded NNEST caucus in 1998 and this caucus as the most active caucus in TESOL, has now more than 1000 members. I also served on the TESOL Board of Directors as Director at Large (2001-2004). All these activities and involvement in TESOL has helped me gain name recognition.
The second major factor is that I am persistent, and very goal-oriented. Working on the TESOL Board takes a tremendous amount of time and energy, and all the work we put into serving the association does not give any financial reward. It is this dedication and devotion to the association as well as the profession that drives me to reach my goals. In 1992, I had a dream to become TESOL president when I presented my first paper at TESOL Convention. It has taken me 12 years of hard work to realize this dream. Being TESOL president means another three-year commitment (President-elect, president, and past president), and I have many other things to do in my life. I have to keep my TESOL presidency as priority.
The third factor is my passion for TESOL to become international, and in my personal statement, I made it very clear that my goal during my presidency is to see TESOL reach out to the world.
21ST:What are your goals in your term as President of the organization?
Liu:As the first non-native English speaking president-elect in TESOL’s recent history, I will focus on three major areas pertinent to TESOL today as a profession as well as an association. First and foremost, I will continue to promote TESOL to reach ESL and EFL teachers in every corner of the world to ensure that our association is truly a global community. As such, I will support efforts to implement new TESOL governance models to empower members to take leadership roles in the affiliates, interest sections, caucuses, committees and beyond. TESOL’s current demographics show that almost 80 percent of our members are US-based. In order to make TESOL international, we have to be aggressive in expanding our international membership. My vision of TESOL in 2007 is that we will have a steady increase of our international membership.
A very important factor that bears consequence to our membership drive is what we can actually offer to them. I believe that TESOL is an association for all its members and therefore, I am keen on working with the board and the central office as a whole to enhance our responsiveness to the membership needs and improve member satisfaction.
I will also support the development of financial resources to help expand member services and to assist with increasing TESOL’s membership worldwide. Since what we do is to produce highly competent English speakers whose first language is not English, those companies and corporations that hire successful Speakers of English as a Second or Foreign Language should appreciate what we do and therefore be our potential donors.TESOL should target profit making companies and organizations that benefit from our services as sources of revenue.Member satisfaction is also a testimony to what we can offer in terms of professional services, on-going support, and mentoring mechanisms beyond conventions, symposia, journals, and publications. I want to listen to members’s input and work on improving membership services with the board and the central office.
Third, I will focus on strengthening the academic and professional rigor of TESOL’s conventions, symposia, and services as well as encourage all types of TESOL-related research that can be synthesized and disseminated to help improve classroom practices. Over the past few years, TESOL has tried to reach out to other professional organizations and associations to find commonalities and explore areas of mutual interest. The colloquium on TESOL and AAAL connections featured in the 2004 TESOL Convention is one example. I believe there are many more such connections out there that TESOL can learn and benefit from. Meanwhile, we have to understand our own strengths and weaknesses as a professional association. For instance, research is one of the six focal areas in TESOL’s strategic plan, and yet the types of research and the purposes for doing research could be different from those in other associations. We want to look into the connection between what we find out from our studies and their implications for classroom practice. Since our association consists of a lot of classroom researchers and practitioners, we should feel proud that we care for the dissemination of our research findings into our classrooms, and we should feel challenged if our research has nothing to do with our classroom practice. We call ourselves applied linguists, and sometimes we call ourselves classroom-based teacher researchers. These labels will become meaningless if what we does not have any consequences on our practices.
As we know, TESOL’s Task Force on Research has already put together a comprehensive research agenda to identify the areas of research we have done, the pertinent issues within each area of research, the available websites for research foci, and the list of journal publications within our areas. The next step is to determine and decide a trajectory research agenda in each area and between or among areas that need to be done in the next five to ten years to further our understanding of the topics of interest.
Part and parcel of this task is also to strengthen the links between theoretical underpinnings and practical considerations, and to position ourselves in the overall research areas among all related fields. Although individual researchers are engaging themselves in different kinds of research, and are making contributions to their respective fields, having a comprehensive research agenda will put us in a position to create the future.
21ST:What’s the current membership situation in TESOL? And how many Chinese ELT experts are in this membership and why is this the case? Could you please talk about the role and importance of Chinese ELT professionals in the organization and what’s being done to make TESOL better known in China?
Liu:The current membership reaches about 14,000 world wide. About 70 per cent are from US. Chinese ELT experts are not among the majority in the international population in the association. The major reason is that China is still not an official affiliate to TESOL because of political reasons. Right now, there are about 200 people from China as TESOL members, and about 70 Chinese ELT professionals attend TESOL conventions every year. Although Chinese scholars in TESOL have gained recognition in their presentations, only a few have assumed leadership positions in this association. Part of the reason is that Chinese professionals still have the “inferiority complex” syndrome as nonnative English speakers competing among native English speaking professionals. Another reason is that they are unfamiliar with a lot of US-based issues. The lack of experience with parliamentary procedures in conducting meetings also pushed Chinese ELT away from taking leadership roles.
During my TESOL presidency (2005-2008), I am committed to see China become a TESOL affiliate, and maybe more Chinese associations will become TESOL affiliates as we are such a large country with so many associations co-existing. It is my hope to have a TESOL convention in China in 2006 with the support from MOE and our own associations. TESOL has already endorsed two international symposia on ELT in China at Shantou University, and TESOL has also been very supportive to China Daily 21st Century’s national English speaking contests over the last few years as one of the sponsors. I believe it needs effort for Chinese nationals to reach out, and for TESOL to come in. If both efforts are made towards the same goal, realizing such a goal is not too far away, and I see myself as a glue to stick them together.
