I hope you had a relaxing holiday season and are returning to "the trenches" refreshed and reinvigorated.

If you're looking for ideas for new courses, curriculum revisions, book and materials reviews or for the latest research in pedagogy, linguistics and literature, I think you'll be pleased with the variety of publications coming your way this year. All ATJ members are entitled to receive a year's subscription to the JLTN Quarterly, which was published for many years by the Center for the Improvement of Teaching of Japanese Language and Culture in High School (CITJ) at the University of Illinois. The Alliance has taken over publication of the JLTN Quarterly as of the October 2000 issue. The excellent reproduceable materials included in every issue and the focused reviews of teaching materials for the K-12 classroom make the JLTN Quarterly an invaluable resource. I am pleased we've found a way for it to continue. Send an e-mail message to ATJ@colorado.edu to receive a sample copy or a year's subscription.

Along with this issue you will receive a copy of the latest ATJ Occasional Papers. This issue is a special collection of articles on language teacher certification and professional development.

The new online "Professional Development Newsletter" is available free of charge to any ATJ member who wants to receive it. Just send your email address with a request to be added to the mailing list. It includes articles of interest to all ATJ members. If you have an idea for a short article to include in the newsletter, please contact the ATJ office or the editor of the e-newsletter, Yasu-hiko Tohsaku, at ytohsaku@ucsd.edu.

Of course, the "tried and true" publications are still being published: the Newsletter will continue as a quarterly print publication for the foreseeable future (though the Board has had discussions in recent years about when in the future it might be feasible to move to an electronic newsletter).

And the journal, now renamed Japanese Language and Literature: Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, is in its thirty-fifth year of publication. The editors and I are proud to announce that the journal will soon be available through JSTOR. Some of you may already be using JSTOR, a database of complete backfiles of some of the best scholarly journals (eg., Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Monumenta Nipponica, etc.). We were pleased to be invited to participate and are working now to round up a complete set of back issues to submit for their files.

On another front, I was delighted to participate in a recent meeting organized by Elizabeth Welles, Director of MLA Foreign Language Programs, and Haruo Shirane, member of the MLA Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages, to discuss ways of encouraging a more active participation by East Asian scholars in the MLA. Some very concrete proposals to expand involvement emerged from the discussion. (See a fuller report on page 14.) Those of you who are MLA members will soon be asked to add your signature to petitions to the MLA Executive Committee in support of new Divisions and new Discussion Groups. Please keep an eye out for the request and help us to bring these plans to fruition. (MLA meets in New Orleans next year. If you haven't attended in a while, this is a good chance to raise the visibility of East Asian scholarship and enjoy some jazz and seafood, too. See you there!)

Elsewhere in this issue, you will find details of the annual ATJ Seminar to be held Thursday, March 22, in Chicago. I hope many of you will be able to attend this excellent program put together by the hard-working seminar committee, Yukiko Hatasa, Virginia Marcus, Mari Noda, Ann Sherif, and Masakazu Watabe.

Also, be sure to cast your vote for five new Board members who will take office at the March meeting. As usual, the nomination committee, made up of outgoing Board members Joan Ericson, Hiroko Kataoka, Seiichi Makino, Judith Rabinovitch, and Kazuo Tsuda, has done an excellent job of putting together a slate of candidates that represents all areas of our field. I want to express my appreciation to those willing to serve on the Board. A nomination is an honor conferred by your peers in the field, and I only wish everyone nominated could be elected each year!

Laurel Rasplica Rodd, President