Let me take this opportunity to wish you a belated Happy New Year! It has been an unseasonably cold year for many of us so far, and I hope that you will join us in warmer Atlanta, Georgia for our ATJ Seminar on Thursday, April 3, 2008. This upcoming seminar promises a rich array of topics. Throughout the day, there are over 55 concurrent panels on linguistics, pedagogy, second language acquisition, and literature. I am grateful to the Chair of the Seminar Committee, Professor Paul Warnick, and the members of his committee for their work in compiling such an impressive seminar. I am pleased to report that the keynote speaker at the end of our seminar will be Professor Haruo Shirane of Columbia University. He will be talking on the topic of "Sennen no Genji monogatari: Why the Tale of Genji Matters." Although it is possible to register for the ATJ Seminar on-site, I encourage you to avoid the lines by registering in advance at the ATJ website, where you can also see and download the full program (http://www.aatj.org/seminar.html).

The ATJ now boasts seven Special Interest Groups (SIGs), most of which are scheduled to meet in Atlanta mid-day during the seminar, and several of them are sponsoring panels as well: Professional Development, Classical, Study Abroad for Advanced Skills, Heritage, Community College, Language and Culture, and the newest, Japanese for Specific Purposes (JSP), which was formed only last fall. According to Professor Tomoko Takami, who is the coordinator of this SIG, the objective of JSP is "to provide support to teachers of JSP by fostering a network among teachers of JSP and offering academic activities to share and learn about various issues relating to teaching JSP" (e.g., a Japanese language course that focuses on science, politics, business, or international relations). For more information about a particular SIG, please see the ATJ website. You are welcome to join and contribute to any of these SIGs.

In addition to the ATJ Seminar, please plan to attend ATJ's sponsored panel session, to be held on Friday, April 4 from 3:15-5:15 p.m. We are honoring our former president, Miyaji-sensei, with a roundtable discussion "A New Era in Japanese Studies: The 1980s-1990s and Beyond. A Discussion in Honor of Hiroshi Miyaji (1925-2007)," chaired by Maggie Childs (University of Kansas). Panelists include Carole Cavanaugh (Middlebury College), Mutsuko Endo Hudson (MSU), William Kelly (Yale), Seiichi Makino (Princeton), and Nobuo Ogawa (Middlebury). This is certain to be a memorable event.

On Saturday, April 5, from 1:00-2:30 p.m., we will hold the ATJ annual general membership meeting. Come find out the results of the election of new board members and officers, learn more about ATJ activities, and listen to reminiscences of Miyaji-sensei. As in the past, you can look forward to door prizes at the conclusion of the meeting. We encourage you also to attend the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference, which will take place at the same hotel in Atlanta from Thursday evening through Sunday noon, April 3-6. There are a number of panels that will be of interest to members of ATJ. For more information, please see the AAS website: www.aasianst.org/.

I would like to thank Susan Schmidt, our Administrative Director in the main office in Boulder, for making the processes of registration and voting much easier for us all. I recently voted in our first online election. I hope that you found this system to be as effective as I did. As I write this message, more than 100 members have cast their ballots, with very few problems. Voting online will close on March 10, 2008, so please make use of this convenient voting system: go to www.colorado.edu/ ealc/atj and click on "Election 2008." Congratulations to our board and especially the members of the Nominating Committee for assembling such an outstanding slate of nominees, and special thanks to those members who were willing to be candidates to serve on the Board.

I trust that you have received your fall 2007 Journal of Language and Literature Special Issue on Study Abroad and have enjoyed reading about this important aspect of our field of Japanese. After the 2007 ATJ seminar in Boston, I proposed to the ATJ Board and the Editors of our journal that we publish another special issue to share the many innovative pedagogical topics that were presented at that seminar: acquisition, culture, immersion programs, interaction, discourse, study abroad, grammar instruction, instruction to hard-of-hearing students, teaching/ learning resources, and technology. Currently the co-editors, Professors Seiichi Makino and Mutsuko Endo-Hudson, are overseeing what promises to be another excellent special issue, due out this fall.

Last May approximately 1,500 high school students sat for the first Japanese Advanced Placement Test. This coming year we can anticipate that an even larger number of students will take this test, since more information about the test is now available. A number of students who took the AP Japanese test in high school enrolled in my college in the fall of 2007; I look forward to welcoming more of these dedicated students into my Japanese language program this coming fall. In part because there are more students entering above the elementary language level, I can anticipate students reaching more advanced levels of Japanese while still undergraduates; I also look forward to being able to incorporate more content-based material in future courses. There is a call in this issue of the Newsletter for more scorers for the next Japanese Language AP test, scheduled for May 2008. Please consider applying for this important position. With the implementation of the new AP test, Japanese language has received tangible recognition as an important language for college-bound students.

I would like to end on a more personal note that demonstrates one aspect of how the field of Japanese language teaching is changing. "What's a language lab?" asked a student just last week in my elementary Japanese language class. She had read over the new vocabulary for the lesson and had come across the word "L.L." It startled me to realize that our current students live and learn in an environment vastly different from my own undergraduate experience. While this student had never heard of a language laboratory, she was able to deftly and quickly learn how to use the hand-held PDA we lend to Japanese language students. This small unit is all she will need to listen to the lessons, look up words in the dictionary, do the homework, and practice writing. In other words, this was her portable L.L. This episode reminded me that we need to be ever mindful of advances in technology and pedagogy that will help our students learn and use their newly gained knowledge.

It has been a great honor to serve ATJ as President for the past year, and I am pleased to pass on the baton to Professor Mari Noda at our membership meeting. Professor Wesley Jacobsen will be stepping down from our leadership "triumvirate," and I greatly appreciate all of his work for ATJ over the past three years. I also look forward to working with the new President-Elect. During the final year of my rotation as Past President, I would like to continue to reach out to all professional levels of those teaching in Japanese pedagogy, linguistics, and literature, and to seek new members for ATJ. As I wrote in an earlier message, I would also like to challenge each of you to encourage your colleagues to become members of ATJ. Our organization is on the forefront of Japanese language and literature and is an important channel for innovations in the field.

I look forward to seeing you at Atlanta at the ATJ Seminar!