Dear Members of the Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics (KASELL),

I am Hae-Kyung Wee of Dankook University, and it is my honor to serve as the 21st President of KASELL.

Since its founding in 2002, KASELL has grown steadily through its national and international conferences and through Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics, a leading journal recognized by the National Research Foundation of Korea and indexed in SCOPUS. Together, these activities have provided an essential platform for scholarly exchange across all areas of English language and linguistics. This remarkable growth is the result of the dedication and hard work of our former presidents, executive members, and researchers. I am deeply grateful for the trust placed in me to assume this important role, which I undertake with a strong sense of responsibility. On a personal note, having participated in KASELL since its inaugural year through conference presentations and journal publications, I feel deeply honored to take on this responsibility.

In recent years, linguistic research, including English linguistics, stands at an important turning point. Over the past decades, linguistics has established its scientific foundations by analyzing language as a formal system of structure and meaning. This line of research has enabled productive intersections with philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, and has provided highly sophisticated theoretical frameworks for understanding how humans construct meaning and engage in communication.

However, since the public release of ChatGPT in the winter of 2022, large language models (LLMs) have raised fundamental questions about the methodologies and orientations of linguistic research. By closely approximating human linguistic performance, these models may give the impression that language can function without linguistic theory. Yet, they do not explain the core components of human linguistic competence that underlie meaning representation and communicative interaction—precisely the concerns that linguistics has long sought to address. At this juncture, language and linguistic research is well positioned to offer essential theoretical reference points for AI research and to explore paths of mutually beneficial development. By building on existing research achievements and pursuing creative and experimental methodologies that integrate and complement research based on large language models, we are presented with an opportunity to deepen our understanding of human language ability, language acquisition, and the foundations of language education. From this perspective, the present moment should be seen not as a period of decline in linguistic research, but rather as a paradoxical opportunity for renewed growth and advancement.

At this critical moment, I will do my utmost to further develop the role of KASELL by actively fostering venues for scholarly exchange and presentation among researchers who are shaping the future of English language and linguistics. I sincerely encourage all members to participate actively in our upcoming conferences and to contribute to our journal, thereby advancing your own scholarly achievements while simultaneously supporting the continued growth of KASELL.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Hae-Kyung Wee
The 21^st President of the KASELL
January, 2026