As this is my last opportunity to write an editorial in ReCALL, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on the journal’s progress over the past seven years and outline its current position. In ReCALL Volume 18 (2) in November 2006 I reported on ReCALL’s early beginnings at the CTI Centre for Modern Languages at the University of Hull in 1990, its relationship with EUROCALL and eventually with Cambridge University Press. At that point, Françoise Blin was about to replace Graham Chesters as co-editor, and our confidence in her ability to take on this role was certainly not misplaced.
Over this seven-year period, ReCALL has continued to be published three times a year, with a steady increase in circulation. During this period we published five special issues involving guest editors: Integrating corpora in language learning (2007, Angela Chambers); Mobile assisted language learning (MALL) (2008, Lesley Shield and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme); CALL and CMC teacher education research (2011, Mirjam Hauck and Nicolas Guichon); Digital games for language learning (2012, Frederik Cornillie, Steven Thorne and Piet Desmet); and Researching uses of corpora for language teaching and learning (2014, Alex Boulton and Pascual Pérez Paredes). The impact of these special issues, together with Cambridge University Press’s marketing programme, is reflected in the increasing number of submissions from around the world.
During this period, after starting to publish ReCALL online as well as in print, Cambridge University Press digitized all previous issues, including those pre-dating our contract with them, so that a valuable archive is now available to all subscribers. Another recent innovation is FirstView, which means that completed and prepared articles are published online well in advance of the printed issue, thus speeding up the process from submission to publication.
Cambridge University Press colleagues worked very hard with Françoise and myself in order to meet all the criteria required to achieve ReCALL’s first Impact Factor, which was first applied in 2012 at 0.95, improving to 1.118 in 2013, with a rank of 29/160 in the Linguistics Journal Citation Report. The support and advice we have received from Cambridge University Press has played a huge part in ReCALL’s success. From the beginning, we have always had a helpful person to turn to whenever needed.
The next chapter in ReCALL’s history is a change in editorial arrangements. Last year I decided the time had come for me to step down and hand over my part of the responsibility as smoothly as possible. To that end, Alex Boulton was appointed as co-editor, along with myself and Françoise Blin, and ReCALL will soon be accepting submissions via the Scholar One system. In the interim period, Alex and Françoise are handling new submissions, and I am dealing with the outstanding ones until the end of 2014. I am sure this arrangement will ensure that ReCALL continues to develop and improve, and I have no qualms about passing it on to others!
For me, the best part of working on ReCALL has been the contact with such a wide range of interesting, educated and helpful colleagues: authors, reviewers, guest editors, staff at Cambridge University Press, and many long-standing EUROCALL friends. In particular, I would like to thank my co-editors Graham Chesters, Françoise Blin and Alex Boulton, reviews editors Jenny Parsons, Íde O’Sullivan and Liam Murray; Fred Riley, who has (voluntarily) maintained the ReCALL pages on the EUROCALL website for many years; and at Cambridge University Press, Patrick McCartan, Martine Walsh, Melissa Good, Katie Smith, Wendy Gater and Sue Tuck, plus many others working away in the background whom I have not met personally. I feel very privileged to have had the support of so many people in helping to create, from scratch, a journal of which I think we can all be proud.
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The five articles in this issue are very diverse, and try as I may I cannot identify a common theme, apart from solid research based on interesting teaching and learning methods. Lina Lee and Alfred Markey explore how the application of Web 2.0 facilitated cross-cultural communication in a Spanish-American telecollaborative project, concluding that through the use of digital technology, students not only gained cultural knowledge but also became more aware of their own beliefs and attitudes toward their own culture. Hora Hedayati and Susan Marandi examined the obstacles to the use of CALL in Iranian universities, analysed the constraints relating to teachers, learners and facilities and suggested ways in which CALL might be promoted in the Iranian context. Euline Cutrim-Schmid and Volker Hegelheimer reported the findings of a case study based on an innovative CALL professional development program for pre-service EFL teachers, involving school-based collaboration with in-service teachers. They outlined important principles and guidelines that should underlie and inform such collaborative efforts and summarized the implications of the findings for the design of CALL pre-service teacher education programs. A study by Dogan Yuksel and Banu İnan examined students’ negotiation of meaning (NofM) in both face-to-face and computer-mediated modes, and concluded that face-to-face promotes a better context for the production of NofM, but the SCMC environment leads to more instances of noticing. And finally, Lily Lim’s article focuses on EFL student interpreters and how web portals may be used to assist them in vocabulary building. The data from the study revealed that students prefer to use web portals that have a specific focus, rather than general search engines, and that guided web portals are essential for users who need to perform web-based language learning activities to achieve efficient search results.
