AILA Development 2020: The Most Relevant Benefits and Urgent Requests
What have AILA’s most relevant benefits been for its national affiliates in the last year, and what are the affiliates’ most urgent wishes for 2020/21? At the 2020 virtual meeting of the Executive Board and the International Committee on August 8, delegates from 26 AILA national affiliates shared their experiences and expectations regarding AILA development.
The most relevant benefits from AILA 2019/2020 include:
- taking part in the flow of communication within AILA
- exploiting the new ways of communication within AILA
- having a professional website and newsletter
- using the AILA channels to publicise national conferences
- getting in touch with affiliates that are far away
- having free access to the AILA Review and AILA’s global network
- integrating AILA board members in the program of national conferences
- being visited by the AILA President
- collaborating with AILA
- realizing the new AILA Ibero-American regional network AIALA
- being part of the AILA East Asia regional network
- expanding within the AILA ASEAN network
- collaborating in the IRAAL-SAALinBiH tandem
- seeing another new AILA affiliate in the neighbourhood emerge
- being part of a wider professional community with similar challenges
The most urgent requests to AILA for 2020/2021 comprise:
- intensifying the communication within the AILA family
- introducing the AILA App
- helping find international authors for one’s national AL journal
- getting support for publishing AILA JRM conference proceedings
- developing new ways of getting together digitally
- jointly developing new conference formats
- providing a common ground for the 20th AILA World Congress
- strengthening relationships with other affiliates in the region
- giving a voice to Applied Linguistics from Latin America
- joint learning of how to deal, as an academic, with issues like Covid-19
- fostering discussions on humanities and languages under threat
- fostering collaboration on transdisciplinarity
- giving advice regarding multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research
- developing a system of AILA workshops, webinars, and competitions
- keeping AILA as present as in the last two years
In line with this feedback, AILA commits itself to further strengthen members’ benefits, together with the national affiliates and our members. Progress will be reported throughout the year in the AILA newsletter and evaluated at the 2021 AILA World Congress in Groningen, August 15–20.