Françoise Blin’s editorial to the previous issue – ReCALL 27(1) – announced a number of ongoing changes to the editorial systems in place. As of 1st November 2014, the entire process from initial submission to final publication is being conducted on line using ScholarOne (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/recall), a regular service endorsed by Cambridge University Press for many of the journals they publish. We hope this will provide a more transparent, reliable and faster service for all involved: authors will be able to track the status of their paper, and reviewers will be able to access the anonymised papers and complete the review forms online; all participants are invited to complete a profile, which will be of tremendous use to the editors. Other changes are also under way, and will be indicated on the ReCALL homepage (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=REC).
On its front cover, ReCALL proudly announces that it is “the journal of EUROCALL”, and traditional practice has been to have one issue each year dedicated to full papers arising from the annual EUROCALL conference and based on that theme. However, despite a substantial increase in the overall number of submissions to ReCALL in recent years, there has been a significant reduction in the number directly linked to the conference, such that it is no longer possible to fill a complete issue. For the last year or two, papers from the conference have been integrated into regular issues, and after discussion with the editorial board this will become accepted practice in future. Short conference papers will continue to be published in an annual volume of proceedings; still other papers are welcome in The EUROCALL Review (www.eurocall-languages.org/publications/review). Dropping a special conference issue will allow us to speed up publication from acceptance to print, thus increasing turnaround even though final versions of papers are published on the journal website in FirstView format as soon as they have been fully copy-edited. It will also free up space for a special issue in September 2016; the recent call resulted in several high quality proposals, and the editors are pleased to announce that the issue will be on “Multimodal environments in CALL” and guest edited by Kristi Jauregi, Sabela Melchor-Couto and José Ramón Calvo-Ferrer. Our thanks to the editorial board for their comments in examining the proposals.
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The six papers in this issue reflect the truly world-wide impact of ReCALL, with contributors working in Australia, Japan, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and the USA, as well as a wide range of research methodologies – primary and secondary research, qualitative and quantitative studies, ecological and experimental contexts in and out of class, etic and emic perspectives for both learners and teachers, and so on.
In any CALL or ICT-related topic, user feedback is essential to promote accessibility, as attested by the first papers here. Debopriyo Roy and Stephen Crabbe have their Japanese learners analyse an English language website and report back on their impressions and findings, including their own meta-cognitive strategies used during the evaluation, on the assumption that such reflection can foster critical thinking and language learning itself. Huizhong Shen, Yifeng Yuan and Robyn Ewing provide a large-scale survey of Chinese EFL teachers’ evaluations of various websites; in addition to issues of usability, they find that the informants particularly appreciate current authentic materials geared to their own needs (e.g. exam-oriented materials) and cultures (Eastern in addition to Western/English-speaking spheres).
In another large-scale survey in Australia, Mike Levy and Caroline Steel explore how recent changes in lexicography – from print to electronic to online and now mobile – affect learners’ perceptions and use of different formats for dictionaries and related resources, the findings showing surprising user sophistication on a number of fronts. A different type of survey is conducted by Guler Duman, Gunseli Orhon and Nuray Gedik, who provide a systematic synthesis of MALL research to date; the paper provides a new and complementary perspective to other types of synthesis, such as the ‘vote-counting’ meta-analysis of MALL by Burston in ReCALL 27(1).
The final two papers are primary studies of specific software and designs. Christine Fredriksson explores variation in how learners of differing proficiency and first language (L1) use chats in an ecological context, as reflected in their participation in different group formats, but also linguistically in terms of complexity and self- or other-correction. Scott Kissau and Bob Algozzine round off the issue with a comparison of different teacher-training formats – online, face-to-face, and hybrid. While all are found to be effective in increasing levels of confidence, the hybrid approach successfully exploits the strengths of each to compensate their respective weaker points, and allow learners to participate in genuine interactions.
