Message from the President
December 24, 2013
Dear CLTA Members and Friends,
2013 has been an extremely dynamic year for our organization. Under the leadership of our immediate past president, Professor Der-lin Chao, Executive Director Yea-Fen Chen, and the Board of Directors, many important organizational changes either have already taken place or will take place in 2014. For more details on this, please read Professor Chao’s message in this volume.
While we are proud of the accomplishments of 2013, looking ahead to 2014, I would like to work with the board and everyone to focus on a few particularly important tasks.
-To reach out to more Chinese language teachers, be they regular members, regional association members, students, or practitioners in general. The future of Chinese language teaching and learning in this country depends very much on the level of professionalism of the practitioners, and this mandates that CLTA play a bigger role in the community. We can accomplish this by offering, among other things, service programs, grants, professional development workshops, and regional meetings.
-To enhance our partnership and collaboration with other professional organizations. We will continue working with ACTFL to create an improved partnership model. We will also need to work with other national and international Chinese and non-Chinese language teachers organizations to improve second/foreign language teaching in general and Chinese language teaching in particular.
-To strengthen our research standing. This rests primarily with our publications. For the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, new submission requirements were implemented in 2013. Starting in 2015, the journal will be published by the John Benjamins Publishing Company, a world-wide leader in publishing linguistic and applied linguistic research. We will ensure a smooth transition to the new publication venue. Also in the planning is free access for members to previously published JCLTA articles in electronic format.
-To increase our sponsorship and fund raising efforts. Thanks to the generous support of sponsors, members, and friends of CLTA, as well as the tremendous efforts of the relevant committees, numerous new sponsorships, awards, and grants have been established. Also to be noted is that there will be new guidelines in place for CLTA sponsorships. I urge everyone to continue the fund-raising effort and participate in the competition for or selection of the awards and grants.
-To improve communication with members and friends of CLTA. Wile the CLTA Newsletter, the mailing list, and the web page are important channels of communication, new ways of communicating with and among members through more interactive means are under discussion and will be implemented in the near future.
-To ensure a successful first CLTA symposium. The First International Symposium on Chinese Language Teaching and Learning to be held in Bloomington, Indiana in October 2014. This is a new model we are experimenting to better serve the regional association members who can not otherwise afford to attend large conventions. This will complement the official CLTA annual conference in connection with the ACTFL Convention and World Language Expo in San Antonio, Texas in November 2014.
Best wishes for a productive 2014!
Hongyin Tao
President of CLTA
Professor, University of California, Los Angeles