[[ SAAL ]]

President's Address

SAAL 23rd Annual General Meeting
by Assoc Prof Low Ee Ling

SAAL Patron and Honorary Lifelong Member Dr Ho Wah Kam, SAAL Advisor A/P Anne Pakir, SAAL Financial Advisor Dr Teng Su Ching, SAAL Immediate Past President, A/P Chng Huang Hoon, Newly Elected Exco Members 2008-2010, Partners in Applied Linguistics, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.

If you visit the homepage of Google Scholar, you will see the phrase "stand on the shoulders of giants". This is how I feel right now, not literally of course.

I wish to first acknowledge the contributions of my immediate past President A/P Chng Huang Hoon during her two terms as President of SAAL by revisiting the key milestones she has achieved for SAAL. I would first like to acknowledge Huang Hoon for:

1. Tightening up the administrative processes within SAAL

She has, through her eye for details, managed to achieve a revised constitution which has been approved by the Registry of Societies to include the following:

Three categories of membership:
1. Individual, Student & Corporate membership
2. 2-year subscription policy
Moving of the SAAL year to 1 Sept to coincide with the academic calendar more closely.
She has also tightened up the Treasury procedures for greater accountability such that SAAL can stand up to the scrutiny of tighter controls over the financial governance of non-governmental agencies.

I am indeed very fortunate to inherit a neat, tidy and most importantly, highly publicly accountable SAAL from Huang Hoon and for this, I say my first 'thank you' to Huang Hoon.

Secondly, Huang Hoon worked tirelessly to bring a new level to the research and publications of SAAL. She did this in a few ways, primarily through the setting up of a Research & Publications Sub-Committee which oversees the research directions and more importantly, the publications for SAAL. And, we have two proud deliverables for this effort: (1) Changing perspectives on pedagogical grammar was published in 2007 and edited by Dr Ruanni Tupas, Dr Yuan Yi and Ms Chris Nur; and (2) Language as commodity which arose initially out of a humble SAAL AGM Forum 2004 published by Continuum, has just been published in 2008 edited by the new VP Dr Peter Tan and my new Asst Treasurer Dr Rani Rubdy.

Next, Huang Hoon also introduced the idea of seeding Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for SAAL. She successfully seeded one known as the SIG on Child Language Acquisition and that SIG has met a few times on their own and developed a comprehensive bibliography on Child Language Acquisition. A comprehensive bibliography on Academic Writing research has also been started by Dr Wu Siew Mei. Both listings are available on our website.

Finally, Huang Hoon also supported the introduction of a SAAL Graduate Seminar Series, a series which has been warmly received by the postgraduate (master's and doctoral students) working across the different institutes in Singapore on research areas linked to Applied Linguistics. Through this platform, SAAL has a means of attracting budding applied linguists on the brink of completing their doctoral dissertations on board. I would like to make special mention of Ao Ran who is now proudly on board our SAAL Exco.

I feel that today, I have to make mention of the main milestones in Huang Hoon's tenure as SAAL President as it is not in her nature to 'brag about herself'. Very much one who shuns the limelight, preferring instead to lead by example behind closed doors, Huang Hoon has worked tirelessly for SAAL, and it is only right that I publicly acknowledge all that she has done for SAAL in her steadfast, persevering and resilient ways. For this, the SAAL outgoing Exco 2006-2008 would like to present Huang Hoon with a very special but personal gift we have specially compiled for her, an idea stolen from something we had done together for Anne Pakir.

Huang Hoon, to ensure that you never forget how much you have toiled for SAAL, I am proud to present you with all the SAAL minutes from the time you took over the helm in 2004 till your very last Exco meeting in 2008. I would like to invite my new VP, Dr Peter Tan, to present you with this special gift.

And that's not all. We have also prepared a little something for you and would like to invite your predecessor and SAAL's adviser A/P Anne Pakir to award you with a plaque from SAAL. Don't worry, along with it doesn't come Honorary lifelong membership yet so don't be frightened off by us.

Now, I just want to spend a few moments to thank another special someone without whom I would not be in Applied Linguistics anyway, and that is my Direct Honours thesis supervisor and academic mentor-extraordinaire A/P Anne Pakir.

I walked into her office in the summer of 1992, fussing over whether I should in fact, be considering the Direct Honours (3-1-1) programme where a select 1% (i.e. 3 of us out of a Year 1 cohort of 300) are granted the opportunity to specialise only in EL. Not only did she persuade me to take on that programme, through being an excellent honours-year supervisor, she inspired me to pursue a doctorate degree at the University of Cambridge in Linguistics and to stay in it for life! She was tolerant of my mischievous ways (including delaying my deadlines as I was waiting all night for my escaped hamster to appear), believing that behind my naughty streaks lay a budding and serious academic who is capable of pursuing a technical field like laboratory phonetics, which she felt was very much needed as a specialisation by a local academic for Singapore's universities.

Her influence in my academic and administrative life has been profound and I am what I am today because of her. As in the acknowledgements page of a book, any errors or omissions in my character remain my sole responsibility. I want to accord her with the same honour that my student have accorded to me: that I am a great teacher because I know what it means to have been taught by a great teacher! Monday was Teachers' Day and, in following your footsteps, we are now both thronged with university administration such that we hardly have time to chat on the phone anymore, I want to wish you a very Happy Teachers' Day and to publicly acknowledge you for what you have done for me all these years.

I would like to consider raising the profile of the SAAL Quarterly to that of a regional applied linguistics journal tentatively called The SAAL Review. SAAL is now 23 years old, a young adult, and our Exco members are renowned in their respective domains in Applied Linguistics, many serving on editorial boards of international journals like TESOL Quarterly and the RELC Journal or serve constantly as peer reviewers for top-tier journals in the field that I feel that this would be a good way forward. It will involve a lot of work but I hope that the new energetic and very academic team (recently promoted associate professors, winners of best dissertation awards, research scholarship awardees, editors and authors of international reviewed journals and books by international printing presses) will be able to work together to achieve this vision.
Secondly, I would like to reach out to regional partners to form a network of AL in the region. One immediate partner could be MAAL who are still in the process of being set up. It is my vision that SAAL helps our neighbours in their bid to promote AL and perhaps to co-organise joint symposia such that, in time to come, AL in the region will achieve an Asian dominance and be less BANA-centred.
I would also like to grow the multilingual focus of SAAL to include SOLE (Singapore's Official Languages Other than English) and to engage the multilingual community of AL practitioners to be interested in contributing to and partnering SAAL in our work.
As an AL organisation and as a teacher educator myself, I will continue to focus on the pedagogical aspects of SAAL, reaching out to teachers at all levels from schools to the tertiary level. I aim to work in close partnership with STETS and have already established informal links with RELC alumni which comprise mainly teachers with have done Master's and PD programmes with RELC and NUS. As for STU, I hope that our close partnership will continue under the able and exemplary guidance of Dr Ho Wah Kam, who has agreed to be our SAAL Patron for the new Exco term.

I have kept you all long enough but I just want to say that I hope that I will be 'worth my weight in salt' (which will amount to quite a lot) and be able to lead SAAL to newer heights and be able with my energetic young team to put Singapore and AL firmly on the international map of AL researchers as well as my predecessors have done!