SPECIAL FEATURE ROUNDTABLE Preparing Applied Linguists for the Future

Abstract

SPECIAL FEATURE ROUNDTABLE Preparing Applied Linguists for the Future Marianne Celce-Murcia University of California at Los Angeles INTRODUCTION the call appeared for abstracts to be submitted to the 1992 meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics When I proposed and subsequently organized a panel discussion on Preparing Applied Linguists for the Future. At UCLA, my colleagues and I had just been grappling with this topic as part of an eight-year review process. I wanted to open up discussion of the topic and to elicit different perspectives from colleagues at other institutions where applied linguists were being trained. I was fortunate that Leslie Beebe (Columbia University), Craig Chaudron (University of Hawaii), Susan Gass (Michigan State University), Sandra Savignon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), John Schumann (UCLA), and John Staczek (Georgetown University) all agreed to participate on the panel. Because of the recent discussions at UCLA on the topic, I asked John Schumann, Chair of the Department of TESL & Applied Linguistics if he would make the opening statement for the panel. I also asked John to circulate a written summary of his remarks to the other panelists one month before the conference so that they could prepare responses to his opening statement as they saw fit. To the editors of lAL I suggested that this topic might be a timely special feature if all the participants wrote up their statements. The editorial board of the journal agreed, and they further proposed that in response to the written statements from the panelists one graduate student from each of the institutions represented on the panel be invited to submit a commentary on all the faculty statements as well. Thus, this special feature was bom. I charged the panelists to think of how we should prepare applied Unguists for the future: What background and skills will Issues in Applied Linguistics (AAAL), ISSN 1050-4273 Vol.3 No. ©Regents of the University of California