Once a year, normally during the annual EUROCALL Conference, the ReCALL editorial board looks back at the journal achievements during the previous twelve months, and discusses its future strategy and activities. The last meeting of the editorial board took place last September in Nottingham, shortly before this current issue went to press. As members of the editorial board were presented with reports from the editors and publishers respectively, one could not but remark that 2011 had been a very busy year for our journal. Calls for papers for two special issues contributed to a surge in submissions (88 compared to 55 in 2010). The first special issue, CALL and CMC teacher education research: enduring questions, emerging methodologies, guest edited by Mirjam Hauck and Nicolas Guichon, was published last September (Volume 23-3). The second one, Digital games for language learning: challenges and opportunities, is being co-edited by Steven L. Thorne, Frederik Cornillie and Piet Desmet, and will be released next September (Volume 24-3). Taken together, these special issues attracted 35 submissions. Out of the remaining 53 articles received in 2011, nine have been or are about to be published, and seven are still being processed at the time of writing. The resulting rejection rate of 70% should however be seen as an indicator of the ever increasing popularity of ReCALL among authors rather than evidence of poor quality submissions. Indeed, many rejected papers will be revised and resubmitted by their authors in due course. Some will eventually be published in ReCALL, others may find other avenues for publication, but all contribute in their own way to the richness of our field.
Measuring the quality of an academic journal by its rejection rate may indeed appear rather cruel. A more constructive indicator, to some extent, is perhaps the journal impact factor. Based on the number of citations to 2009 and 2010 ReCALL articles in 2011 issues of other journals indexed by ISI, ReCALL first impact factor will be released in June of this year. Citations to the five articles in this issue will therefore contribute to the impact factor that will be released in 2014. In the meantime, and more importantly, they do give us some interesting findings and food for thought. In the first article, Jérôme Eneau and Christine Develotte look at the impact of reflection and collaboration on the development of learner autonomy among online learners and examine the creation of a “new distance learning culture”. The development of learner autonomy is also fostered by task-based interactions in environments such as Second Life as shown by Mark Peterson's study. Furthermore, his analysis of text chat interactions in Second Life suggests that the virtual world provides valuable opportunities for learner-centred social interaction and language practice. In the third article, John Kerins and Allan Ramsay report on the development of a prototype NLP tool designed to help learners become aware of their language use with respect to tense and aspect, through the dynamically generated graphical representations of the temporal relationships between discourse events as they are written. Next, Chao-Jung Ko shows how three different synchronous learning environments (video/audio, audio and face-to-face) impact differently on learners’ perception of social presence. Finally, Klaus Brandl's study of required and optional online interactions, under synchronous and asynchronous conditions, leads to interesting implications for task design and implementation in online environments.
The editors would like to thank the following members of the ReCALL Editorial Board and Academic Advisory Panel for reviewing papers during 2011:
David Barr, Alex Boulton, Angela Chambers, Thierry Chanier, Françoise Demaizière, Nina Garrett, John Gillespie, Ana Gimeno, Michael Goethals, Nicolas Guichon, Mirjam Hauck, Trude Heift, Dominique Hémard, Phil Hubbard, Marie-Noëlle Lamy, Peter Liddell, David Little, François Mangenot, Vera Menezes, Sue Otto, Kazumi Sakai, Mathias Schulze, Lesley Shield, Glenn Stockwell, Peppi Taalas, Maija Tammelin.
