Nobody expected an international lockdown in 2020, much less for it to continue into 2021; I certainly did not expect to be writing of this again for January 2022. As many of us have got used to teaching from home, so research in the classroom has diminished, giving way to online or hybrid formats that have generated considerable food for thought, as well as research output. Much of this, however, has been ad hoc, comparing previous course formats against current constraints, with computers and other technology largely given over to this online condition rather than pushing the boundaries of research in CALL. In terms of submissions to ReCALL, the results have been three-fold: (a) a somewhat higher rejection rate; (b) a slightly slower time from submission to acceptance, as reviewers have been more difficult to find; (c) a delay in accepted papers being assigned to an issue – although they are of course available online as soon as they are ready (see FirstView articles). This last point has yet to really be felt, but to pre-empt future delays we have decided to increase the number of papers in each issue. Assuming the rate of submissions returns to pre-COVID levels, this will allow us to catch up with the backlog and make the situation a little more comfortable for special issues in the future.
This year, Cambridge University Press instigated a new prize for the “best” ReCALL paper published in the preceding year (issues 32.3 to 33.2), although “best” is of course a delicate question. The editors drew up a shortlist of two papers from each issue to be voted on by the full editorial board, the prize this year being awarded to Christine Appel and Joan-Tomàs Pujolà for their paper in issue 33.2 titled “Designing Speaking Interaction in LMOOCs: An eTandem Approach” – congratulations to them! And indeed to all the other contributors who make ReCALL one of the top journals in its field. On this topic, the annual JCR impact factor for ReCALL is encouraging, increasing by 58% from 1.842 in 2019 to 2.917 in 2020, with a consequent rise to 21st place among all linguistics journals. That said, other journals are also increasing their IF, suggesting that more research overall has been published during COVID; certainly more people are downloading papers from ReCALL. And, as always, we need to be careful with overinterpreting any bibliometrics.
In other news, many of you will have seen the call for papers for a ReCALL special issue on Replication in CALL to be guest edited by Cornelia Tschichold (Swansea University, UK). The deadline for submission of full papers is the 15th May 2022, and please do get in touch with her if you have any questions. The issue itself is due out as ReCALL 35.2 in May 2023. Also, we discovered that a special issue of ReCALL from 1998 titled Language Processing in CALL was missing from the journal homepage; our thanks to Cornelia Tschichold for noticing this, the editors of the issue for agreeing to its publication (Mathias Schulze, Marie-Josée Hamel and June Thompson), and CUP for making it fully available. Last year saw the introduction of a newsletter timed to coincide with the publication of each new issue, featuring a short introduction and links to the latest articles – something we’d been planning to do for years but only finally got around to during COVID. The EUROCALL conference held virtually in Paris in August 2021 saw an editors’ workshop hosted by Shona Whyte and David Barr from ReCALL, along with representatives from seven other CALL journals. The topic, “Reviewing CALL research”, is of course of major interest for both reviewers and authors as well as editors; the activity is undervalued in academia with explicit instruction rarely provided. We do, however, have notes for reviewers on the ReCALL homepage, and recommend that all academics make use of COPE resources, notably their ethical guidelines. Finally, we welcome Kate Borthwick to the editorial board as Treasurer of EUROCALL, and thank Sake Jager for his time with us.
As is usual in the first issue of the year, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those researchers who reviewed submissions to ReCALL – 153 individuals from 29 countries over the year from October 2020 to September 2021 inclusive. Many of them conducted several reviews, including revisions of earlier versions where their continued input is invaluable. Their contribution is essential in making ours a top journal. They are: Muhammad Abdel Latif, Zsuzsanna Abrams, Saad Alzahrani, Mohammad Amiryousefi, Alberto Andujar, Christine Appel, Jorge Arús, Elena Bárcena, Zsuzsanna Bárkányi, Daniela Bartalesi-Graf, Tita Beaven, Elaine Beirne, Robert Blake, Linda Bradley, Neil Briggs, Camino Bueno-Alastuey, Jack Burston, Fidel Çakmak, Silvia Canto, M. Dolores Castrillo, Catherine G. Caws, Chen Chen, Hao-Jan Chen, Chin-Wen Chien, Nuttakritta Chotipaktanasook, Letizia Cinganotto, Francesca Coccetta, Jozef Colpaert, Anna Comas-Quinn, Barbara Conde Gafaro, Frederik Cornillie, Peter Crosthwaite, Dustin Crowther, Alejandro Curado Fuentes, Dan Douglas, Idée Edalatishams, Linda Edwards, Khaled Elebyary, Martina Emke, Ömer Eren, Alannah Fitzgerald, Marta Fondo García, Luciana Forti, Jonás Fouz-González, Anca Frumuselu, Yumiko Furumura, Adam Gacs, Chuan Gao, Joe Geluso, Tesfaye Gezahegn, John Gillespie, Ana Gimeno, Marta Giralt, Senta Goertler, Cecilia Goria, Nicolas Guichon, Agata Guskaroska, Mar Gutiérrez-Colón, Eric Hagley, Regine Hampel, Sumi Han, Barbara Hanna, Volker Hegelheimer, Francesca Helm, Shannon Hilliker, Zeping Huang, Phil Hubbard, Neil Hughes, Peter Ilic, Yasushige Ishikawa, Sake Jager, Kristi Jauregi, Napat Jitpaisarnwattana, Ann Jones, Andrea Kárpáti, Jarosław Krajka, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Chun Lai, Yu-Ju Lan, Bradford Lee, Brenda Lee, Hansol Lee, Sangmin Lee, Adrian Leis, Jennifer Lertola, Yeu-Ting Liu, Conchúr Mac Lochlainn, Marni Manegre, François Mangenot, S. Susan Marandi, Alfred Markey, Antonio Martínez Sáez, Sara Matlack, Michael McLaren, Detmar Meurers, Julia Miller, Tracey Millin, Chloe Mills, António Moreira, Valentina Morgana, Nicholas Musty, Maarit Mutta, Chau Nguyen, Anna Nicolaou, Susanna Nocchi, Caoimhín Ó Dónaill, Robert O’Dowd, Breffni O’Rourke, Marina Orsini-Jones, Ana Oskoz, Salomi Papadima-Sophocleous, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Joanna Pitura, Alain Polguère, Natasha Randall, Geraint Rees, Randi Reppen, Elaine Riordan, Ornaith Rodgers, Fernando Rosell-Aguilar, Fernando Rubio, Aysel Saricaoglu, Cédric Sarré, Yoshiho Satake, Müge Satar, Takeshi Sato, Shannon Sauro, Theresa Schenker, Beatriz Sedano, Rustam Shadiev, Natalia Shalaeva, Lijing Shi, Jonathan Smart, Maggie Sokolik, Jeong-Bae Son, Glenn Stockwell, Anaïs Tack, Johanna Tramantano, Cornelia Tschichold, Sheng-Shiang Tseng, Henry Tyne, Joshua Underwood, Robert Vanderplank, Julie Van der Vyver, Boris Vazquez-Calvo, Margarita Vinagre, Nina Vyatkina, Shona Whyte, Hye Jin Yang, Jun Yang, Eric Young, Danyang Zhang, Tong Zhao.
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This issue is slightly bigger than usual, with eight papers in total, but as fascinating as always! The first ones all focus on telecollaboration in one way or another, beginning with Aleksandra Wach, De Zhang and Kristen Nichols-Besel (available in open access). They look at how 14 pre-service language teachers in the United States interacted via email with learners of English (also future teachers) in Poland and China, using telecollaboration to develop grammar communicatively. Similarly, Robert O’Dowd and Melinda Dooly examined international virtual exchanges, here within the European EVALUATE project featuring 34 institutions from 16 countries overall, with 31 participating teachers being interviewed to see how the exchanges contributed to their development as teachers within an international community. In the third, Han Luo and Chunsheng Yang take the students’ perspective with American learners of Chinese. They also show that the benefits go beyond mere language learning and into the realms of cultural development, especially at higher levels of proficiency.
Chinese as a foreign language also features in the paper by John S. Y. Lee, here for extensive reading. Again, the students are at the centre in this individualised system for recommending appropriate texts based on the proportion of new words as compared to a user-specified target. Vocabulary is explicitly at the centre of the approach explored by Yan Li and Christoph A. Hafner, comparing mobile and paper-based flash cards for both receptive and productive learning of new by Chinese EFL learners. Both were effective, but the interactive nature of the mobile cards gave them a significant advantage.
Tools such as Google Translate have led to heated debate among teachers, Sangmin-Michelle Lee here exploring how it stands up against learner translations from Korean to English. While there seemed to be little difference in the communicative effectiveness of the two, the machine translations were better on most criteria, giving rise to discussion of causes and possible implications. Another controversial feature of the internet is the availability of videos for possible language learning; Baohua Yu and Artem Zadorozhnyy turn this round by getting their Hong Kong students involved in producing videos as an alternative to in-class presentations. This collaborative procedure was designed to combine language learning with digital literacy and autonomy. Still on the topic of projects, the final paper by Fatemeh Nami also brings us back to the issue of teacher training. This is a detailed case study of six in-service teachers in Iran, and how their own projects contributed to the pedagogical development of their use of CALL as a whole.
I hope you enjoy the issue, and keep up the good work in CALL as well as your health wherever you may be around the world.
