As the school year wraps up, it is time for a well-earned break. Whether you are heading off to cooler places to enjoy summer with loved ones or staying inside to catch up on research and life planning, I wish you a wonderful season. Let us take a quick look back at the year and see what comes next!

This year has so far seen a number of guest presenters with Sachi Oshima in January who guided participants on oral presentation skills for students with lower English proficiency. I stayed up until 4am in the morning in the UK to watch this! There was also Theron Muller who gave advice on streamlining research and teaching practices. He will also be YoJALT’s featured speaker at JALT National in. November alongside Philip McCarthy and Jerry Talandis Jr. They will be giving both a research and workshop presentation on The New Auto-Peer. April saw Bethany Lacy who gave advice on publishing from submission to acceptance, or rejection. This was followed by Eucharia Donnery’s embodied approaches to teacher well-being and burnout prevention in May and only last week Alison Hasegawa’s interactive read-alouds that showed that picture books can spark thinking and feeling among many other things!

We also held our Spring MyShare, in March with 7 presenters whose contributions will be published in a future Special Edition of Accents Asia alongside presenters from December 2025. Our next MyShare will take place on October 25th – Here. Send a short abstract and a brief bio to Andrew Devitt – ander.jp.uni@gmail.com by September 1st if you are interested in presenting and getting a publication in Accents Asia.

We also have an exciting Autumn and Winter to look forward to! On the 20th September I’ll be interrupting my Kendo Camp in Yamanashi to travel to Keio, Hiyoshi to see Kinsella Valies give us practical publishing skills, specifically on turning research into clear, publishable papers. After that there is the JALT national conference at the end of November. There will be many YoJALT members attending and presenting, so we’d love to see you there! Then we round off the year with Bruno Vannieu who will give us practical tips for teaching oral communication classes in Japan. I’m sure this will be followed by our annual bonenkai too, so sign up the the monthly newsletter and wait for more details!

John.