NASFLA newsl

The North American Systemic Functional Linguistic Association was organized April 8, 2002 in Salt Lake City. Our web site is <http://www.yorku.ca/cummings/nasfla>. On the web site you will find the minutes of the Organizational Meeting by Carolyn Hartnett which includes a list of the officers elected, and the constitution. You will also find our mailing list which for now is being used as a tentative membership list. "Membership" is free. If you want your name removed, please let Michael Cummings <mcummings@GLENDON.YORKU.CA> know. Also, if you have friends you would like added, feel free to do so. Send Michael any corrections. For now we would like to bring your attention to some of our projects.

1. Please post bibliographies on web. Because we are spread out and most of us are isolated, we would like to start to get to know one another. One suggestion we are working on is the sharing of bibliographies. Could you send a bibliography of some portion of your work [classroom, article, topical, annotated] to Web Master Michael Cummings <mcummings@GLENDON.YORKU.CA> to be posted on our web site? Eventually we hope to start annotating all the bibliographies. Please add a small note about your work to provide context for the bibliography. In this way, we hope those with similar interests can start communicating with one another.

2. We are interested in discovering who is teaching Systemic Functional Linguistics on this continent. Could you please send Michael Cummings <mcummings@GLENDON.YORKU.CA> a short description of any courses that you teach at your university (or any that you know that others teach) which regularly use the Systemic Functional model as a significant part of the discussion. (We are not particularly interested in, say, a seminar which *occasionally* discusses SFL.) We will then post the list to the website. As part of the description please include the course number, the level (upper class, MA students, etc), and the intended audience (e.g. prospective secondary school teachers).

3. Please submit proposals to professional meetings. There is a list of friendly organizations in the minutes. Please feel free to submit proposals either alone or with others of our group.

NCTE has already invited Jay Lemke to speak at the NCTE Atlanta Convention in November, 2002. Jay was invited by the President of NCTE, David Bloome.

In addition, the NASFLA Executive Committee will be trying to submit a proposal for our association to the Ninth Annual Meeting of the International Association of World Englishes [IAWE] to be held at the University of Illinois, October 17-20, 2002. Since Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan are very likely to be there, we have tentatively requested a half day meeting of NASFLA. We could probably ask for more time. If you want to participate in the NASFLA mini-Conference in Illinois, please send your one page proposals by email to Michael Cummings by July 1. Please give all your contact information. The Executive Committee of NASFLA will meet in Liverpool and try to put a unified program together with a selection of our members papers. This will be a mini-Conference within an International Conference. Do visit the web site of IAWE [http://www.linguistics.uiuc.edu/iawe]. Many of the topics mentioned in the IAWE call for papers overlap with some of our work. Feel free to submit proposals to IAWE also.

C. LSA [Linguistic Society of America]

2003 LSA [Linguistic Society of America] Summer Institute, [Language, Mind and Culture] June 30-August 8, 2003, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. Proposed Mini-Conference for NASFLA on some/any weekend. Check web site for conferences/workshops already scheduled. <http://lsa2003.lin.msu.edu/>

The NASFLA Executive Committee is also preparing a proposal for a 1, 2 or 3 day NASFLA Mini-Conference to be run in conjunction with the 2003 LSA Summer Institute. Please submit a one page abstract to Michael Cummings by July 1. Please indicate what dates you CAN NOT be in Michigan between June 30-August 8. We can choose any weekend. The NASFLA Executive Committee will meet in Liverpool and try to put a conference schedule together depending on how many proposals we receive. Let's try for A THREE DAY conference. This will be a Mini-Conference within a Summer Institute.

Both the LSA and IAWE proposals are due by the end of July. Does anyone want to help with this? i.e. write proposals, chair conference? Please contact Nan Fries [Fries1ph@cmich.edu] if you can help. Thanks.

Many thanks to all who attended our meeting and have supported this effort. Our international systemic web site for upcoming meetings is: <www.ISFLA.org>. Also, a large bibliography of references more or less directly concerned with systemic linguistics is available at < http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/langpro/bibliographies/index.htm>. Send news please. Summer travels? Should we meet in Liverpool?

Keep in touch,

Nan