By Paul Kei Matsuda, associate professor of English

I went to Nagoya, Japan, to attend the 12th Annual Convention of the International Association for World Englishes, which was held at Chukyo University, Japan, from Oct. 7 through 9, 2006. World Englishes is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry focusing on issues related to the world-wide spread of English and the rise of different varieties of English—or Englishes—in various parts of the world.

Presenters and participants represented Australia, China, Germany, Ghana, India, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among other countries.

I was invited to attend the conference as one of the four plenary speakers. My plenary talk, entitled "World Englishes and Writing Instruction: Conflicts and Possibilities," explored the theoretical and practical difficulties in incorporating insights from the field of world Englishes into the teaching of writing, and discussed how writing pedagogy might be transformed in increasingly multilingual, multicultural and multinational contexts.

I also suggested the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in raising the awareness of linguistic diversity and changes not only among students but among writing teachers, language teachers, faculty across the curriculum, editors and publishers, and the larger public.

Professor Aya Matsuda, also from UNH, and I also presented a paper, "The Internationalization of Technical Communication Textbooks." We reported the results of our analysis of four technical communication textbooks for their inclusion of international communication issues that are becoming increasingly important in today's global economy.

We discussed how the textbooks represented the relationship between technical communicators and international audience, and how issues of language and cultures are incorporated. We pointed out the need for world Englishes specialists to be involved in the development of technical communication textbooks in order to facilitate the integration of international and global issues into the teaching of spoken and written communication.

More information about the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) is available at: http://www.iaweworks.org/. Information about this year's IAWE conference is available at: http://we.lets.chukyo-u.ac.jp/iawe2006/.

After the conference, I joined Professor Miyuki Sasaki, Nagoya Gakuin University, and Professor Masumi Narita, Tokyo International University, for a site visit in preparation for the Symposium on Second Language Writing to be held at Nagoya Gakuin University in September 2007.

The Symposium is an international conference that I have co-founded with Professor Tony Silva, Purdue University, in 1998. Professors Sasaki and Narita will be working with me as local organizers for the 2007 Symposium. More information about the Symposium on Second Language Writing is available at: http://sslw.jslw.org/.