This issue marks the beginning of the thirtieth year of publication for ReCALL. We hope to mark our thirtieth birthday proper next year, when we’ll have three full decades under our belts. Beginning with only one issue in 1989, we moved first to two and then to three from 2007, and the increasing volume of submissions suggests a continuing bright climate for CALL. Initially published by the CTI Centre for Modern Languages, the journal had its first “web issue” in 1999, and has been published by Cambridge University Press since 2000 in an ongoing fruitful partnership. Early issues of ReCALL were made possible by the tremendous efforts of Graham Chesters and June Thompson, later joined by Françoise Blin in 2008. Françoise has now stepped down from her role as Editor, though she has agreed to join the Editorial Board and continue to make her vast wealth of experience and expertise available to the new editorial team, for which we are hugely grateful. She will leave a lasting imprint on the journal.
Other changes to the editorial team include a farewell to Liam Murray, our Reviews Editor. As we receive so few papers reviewing books, software, websites, apps or other materials, the decision was made not to accept such submissions in the future. Interested authors can, however, submit review papers to the EUROCALL Review: please see https://polipapers.upv.es/index.php/eurocall for details. Our thanks to Liam for all his work over the years and his continuing commitment as he too joins the ReCALL Editorial Board. We also welcome three new Associate Editors alongside David Barr and Frederik Cornillie: Linda Bradley at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Ana Gimeno-Sanz at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain (who therefore leaves the Editorial Board); and Cornelia Tschichold at Swansea University, UK. Their help in dealing with the large numbers of papers received will be greatly appreciated, and we very much looking forward to working with all of them. Finally, the Editorial Board has also undergone some changes. In addition to those mentioned above, two people have decided to step down: our grateful thanks to Melinda Dooly and Nicolas Guichon after five years each on the board. We’re delighted to welcome Jack Burston, Catherine Caws, Fiona Farr, Marie-Josée Hamel, Francesca Helm, Kristi Jauregi and Shona Whyte. For the full current composition of the editorial team, please see the Cambridge University Press ReCALL website.
Other news in brief: The two-year impact factor more than doubled in 2016 to 2.333. In effect, this means that each paper published in 2014–2015 was cited on average 2.333 times in listed journals in 2016, with ReCALL ranking seventh out of 180 journals in linguistics as a whole. This is of course excellent news, although the relatively low figures in linguistics mean that there is a large element of random variation. In other changes, we have decided to solicit three reviews from the start, and are aiming at a shorter turnaround in the review process. Finally, readers may notice that we have added a short paragraph “about the author(s)” at the end of each paper for greater visibility.
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The first three papers in this issue look at resources for lower-level learners, particularly for vocabulary. To begin with a question that may seem obvious: Should learners use dictionaries during reading, and if so, how? The study by Robert Francis Dilenschneider compares reading alone to clicking on unknown words versus typing them in to access dictionary definitions. The post-test results show that the read-only group did slightly better in terms of overall comprehension, but that both experimental groups performed better on other measures, with the type-in group best at recalling form, and the click group best at meaning, whether productive or receptive. Resources can be built in, as in the study by Fidel Çakmak and Gülcan Erçetin, which looked at the relative effectiveness of different types of vocabulary aids during listening comprehension on smartphones. All three gloss types (text, picture, or both) seemed to aid vocabulary recall equally well, and better than the control group with no glosses; however, no significant differences were found in terms of overall text recall. The absence of evidence can be difficult to spot, but overgenerated be provides the focus for the study by Soyeon Moon and Sun-Young Oh. They devised data-driven learning (DDL) materials for their middle-school students, derived from an appropriate native corpus as well as a learner corpus of peer writing. Both DDL and control groups reduced occurrences of the erroneous item, but the DDL group performed substantially better in both immediate and delayed post-tests. Questionnaires also showed these learners responding favourably to the materials and the approach.
The many studies of CALL over the decades have shown that technology can be useful, but we also need to look at how teachers go about using it, and what underlies the choices they make. The situated ecological study by Qian Liu and Chin-chi Chao draws on substantial observation and interview data with a single teacher, using detailed episodes to illustrate major factors in her use of technological affordances and how she motivates this based on her pedagogical considerations and her goal of encouraging learner agency. Ongoing teacher education in a university context is the focus of the next paper by Müge Adnan. Detailed questionnaires examine a number of concepts; one particular finding is that teacher satisfaction is linked to readiness, especially in terms of openness to the affordances of online teaching and the skills to put it into practice.
Rong Yang looked at what happened when Chinese learners of English and American learners of Chinese interacted in synchronous online discussion for language and culture. The focus was on the questions asked – the overall numbers but also types of questions grouped into higher and lower order thinking, which are interpreted in the context. In the final paper in this issue, Hossein Bozorgian and Ebrahim Fakhri Alamdari examined the effects of metacognitive instruction on multimedia listening comprehension over 10 weeks, with or without dialogic interaction. The results show both experimental groups making significant progress in terms of listening results, and increasing their metacognitive awareness.
The editors would like to thank the following reviewers of submissions to ReCALL for their contribution from October 2016 to September 2017 inclusive:
Ufuk Balaman, Aurélie Bayle, Anke Berns, Serge Bibauw, Stephen Bodnar, Jack Burston, José Ramón Calvo-Ferrer, Silvia Canto, Thierry Chanier, Carol A. Chapelle, Maggie Charles, Anne Chateau, Tatiana Codreanu, Josez Colpaert, Catia Cucchiarini, Carrie Demmans Epp, Mats Deutschmann, Melinda Dooly, Vera Dugartsyrenova, Anna Dziemianko, Pauline Ernest, Elizabeth Falconer, Luciana Forti, Joe Geluso, John Gillespie, Ana Gimeno-Sanz, Sean Grant, Paul Gruba, Nicolas Guichon, Marie-Josée Hamel, Regine Hampel, Sumi Han, Barbara Hanna, Mirjam Hauck, Trude Heift, Francesca Helm, Phil Hubbard, John Humbley, Ana Ibáñez, Jesús Izquierdo, Stephen Jeaco, Christopher Jenks, Andrea Kárpáti, Jeff Kuhn, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Gosia Kurek, Leena Kuure, Mike Levy, Robert Lew, Denis Liakin, Meei-Ling Liaw, Huifen Lin, David Little, Teresa Mackinnon, François Mangenot, S. Susan Marandi, Atsushi Mizumoto, Gary Motteram, Liam Murray, Kristi Newgarden, Susanna Nocchi, Robert O’Dowd, Ana Oskoz, Luisa Panichi, Jaeuk Park, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Elke Peters, Mark Peterson, Luke Plonsky, Alain Polguère, Annelies Raes, Jon Reinhardt, Ornaith Rodgers, Christine Rodrigues, Fernando Rosell-Aguilar, Lanhui Ryder, H. Müge Satar, Mathias Schulze, Klaus Schwienhorst, Bryan Smith, Simon Smith, Geoff Sockett, Suhad Sonbul, Glenn Stockwell, Julie Sykes, Peppi Taalas, Osamu Takeuchi, Sylvie Thouësny, Sacip Toker, Yukio Tono, Cornelia Tschichold, Joshua Underwood, Scott Windeatt, Eric Young, Gang Zeng, Dongping Zheng.
