Dear Exhibitors:

Our 2004 conference will take place May 1-4 at the Portland Marriott Downtown Portland, Oregon. We would be delighted if you would exhibit at our AAAL Conference, as it would provide our members with an important means of finding out about the latest publications in the field, and we believe that it would offer you an excellent opportunity to advertise and sell your publications. In addition, the conference provides a convenient venue to meet with authors of your books and identify prospective authors.

Ours is a conference whose participation has steadily been growing. We anticipate attendance of about 1000 teachers, researchers, and other language professionals. The members of our broad-based, growing, and interdisciplinary organization have interests in first and second language acquisition and use, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, language teaching and testing, ethnic relations, bilingual education, educational policy, and research methodology, among others. These members seek out the publishers' exhibits in order to select course texts, make recommendations to colleagues, identify books for their institutional libraries to order, and purchase additions to their own collections.

Although the AAAL Conference has traditionally been held in the same metro area as the TESOL Convention and within a time frame that is close to TESOL’s, this year for the first time, we will not follow this tradition. One reason why we are moving away from past practice, at least for the next three Conferences is because of the special AILA/AAAL joint conference scheduled for late July 2005. We did not want to have an extended gap between AAAL Conferences, which would have been the case had we adhered to TESOL’s schedule. It is also important for you to be aware that AAAL attracts participants whose interests -particularly in research - are not represented at TESOL. Consequently, we feel that the AAAL Conference is the ideal venue for displaying materials to academics who adopt books for graduate and undergraduate courses and programs or who select materials for their own and their institutional libraries to order, and who purchase additions to their own collections. A survey which we conducted in the last several years revealed that less than 30 percent of AAAL Conference attendees also went to the TESOL Conference. As this illustrates, the two conferences, AAAL and TESOL, largely serve two different populations of language professionals.

Enclosed you will find an exhibits reservation form, and a preliminary exhibits schedule. When completed, the preliminary program will be posted on the conference website at www.aaal.org/aaal2004/. Representatives may make hotel reservations at the Portland Marriott Downtown by calling 1-503-226-7600. (Please be sure to inform the hotel that you are attending the Conference for the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) to get the conference rate). We also hope to set up on-line registration on our website.

I hope this finds you interested in the exhibiting and advertising opportunities which our AAAL Conference offers. Any questions you have about the particulars of the conference or exhibiting at AAAL 2004 can be sent to Robert Ranieri at the AAAL Business Office (1-205-824-7700 or robert@primemanagement.net or P. O. Box 361806 Birmingham, AL 35236).

Best wishes,
Nancy H. Hornberger
AAAL 2004 Exhibits Coordinator
Professor, University of Pennsylvania