From the President
December 2001
Source: CLTA Newsletter 25.3. December 2001, p. 5. November 27, 2001
I write this at the conclusion of our 2001 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., impressed by the professional accomplishments of our colleagues in the Chinese language teaching field and “recharged” by their collective energy. This year’s conference demonstrated ongoing sophistication in the use of technol-ogy in Chinese teaching and research, continued concern about the factors that influence Chinese la n-guage learning, and increased attention to the development of reading skills in CSL learners. Every pres-entation generated discussion and reflection, and I look forward to sharing the experience with all of you at next year’s meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.This year is a special one for CLTA, for it marks the 40th anniversary of our organization. The Board of Directors is planning several initiatives to celebrate the occasion. We will working on a history of CLTA, a task for which we seek information and assistance from all of you. If you have information about the early days of the organization, and especially if you were one of its early members, please let us hear from you. Other projects include the creation of a Chinese language honor society for students at the college and university level to complement the high school honor society created by CLASS several years ago. We continue to be concerned about teacher training and will be exploring the possibility of developing CLTA sponsored teacher training workshops in the next few years. We are in the process of developing a CLTA mission statement that will help to focus and guide us as we move forward in the 21st century. We will ask for your feedback on this statement and for your approval in the coming months.
Finally, we continue to recognize the importance of links with other professional organizations whose missions overlap with ours. We maintain an affiliation with ACTFL and AAS, and are discussing a closer connection with MLA. In an earlier newsletter this year I described the role that JNCL-NCLIS plays in lobbying for support for language teaching on a national level. We value our ties with other Chi-nese language teaching organizations and will be participating with several of them in the Chinese Lan-guage Field Initiative project organized by NCOLCTL, the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages.
CLTA works for all of us. Thank you for supporting it with your membership, with your contribu-tions to the journal, and with your participation at our annual meeting.
Claudia Ross
Modern Languages (Box 11A)
College of the Holy Cross
Worcester, MA 01610-2395
Phone: 508-793-3335
Fax: 508-793-3708
E-mail: cross@holycross.edu