I hope this will be the last time I need to mention COVID-19 – there are plenty of other crises in the world today. Though there are still COVID-related risks, we may tentatively hope to avoid future lockdowns. That said, the pandemic may have long-term effects on CALL practices in and out of class, as well as on research. Submissions are down from the peak in 2020, but we are still at nearly 50% over pre-COVID levels for ReCALL, as for other journals in CALL and applied linguistics more generally, and no doubt further afield. Scams are also on the rise, and we have to be vigilant; fortunately, they still represent only a tiny fraction of the overall submission rate. As I said last year, we have negotiated an increase in our page count with Cambridge University Press, so we can publish slightly more papers than before – as long as they aren’t too long. Our page limitation means that if we publish long papers, we can publish fewer papers overall. We have indeed been seeing an increase in papers that do not respect the word count and we frequently have to ask authors to reduce length before we consider their submissions. This may involve simply cutting, or limiting tables and figures, and moving some elements to online-only supplementary materials – this last being important, as ReCALL does encourage open science as far as possible and would like to see more materials, instruments and complete data sets accompanying the papers on our website or on platforms such as IRIS. A separate cause of increasing length comes from a trend towards meta-analyses and other syntheses, which may require a little more space. Here, too, we need to be a little selective as many syntheses cover similar ground.
Our latest impact factor has increased by 45%, from 2.917 in 2020 to 4.235 in 2021. While increased research activity and the number of publications may account for this in part, other journals are equally affected; but ReCALL has gained 27 places in the JCR table and is now ranked 13th in linguistics as a whole. Congratulations to our authors for their excellent work that inspires others! Citation is indeed important, as we do want our work to be relevant to a wide readership, hence the title of the editors’ workshop at the EUROCALL 2022 conference: “Just being published or being published and cited?” Hosted by Ana Gimeno as associate editor of ReCALL, the session featured editors from seven other CALL-related journals. Also at the conference, we announced the winner of the CUP–EUROCALL annual prize for the best paper published in ReCALL between September 2021 and May 2022 (Issues 33.3 to 34.2): Ciara R. Wigham and Müge Satar for their paper titled “Multimodal (inter)action analysis of task instructions in language teaching via videoconferencing: A case study.” Congratulations to them!
Returning to bibliometrics, I do always caution against attributing too much importance to them, especially in fields such as ours where the IFs are relatively low. Other numbers include an increase in online views and downloads; it is interesting to note, however, that this does not occur immediately a paper appears in FirstView, but mainly upon publication of a complete issue, highlighting the importance of the configuration of database search engines, as well as the presentation of our website and related announcements. Future changes are to be expected in the coming years as much of the industry transitions from free-to-publish towards free-to-read, with costs being covered by agreements between publishers and various countries and institutions. Watch this space!
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 over the year from October 2021 to September 2022 inclusive – 110 individuals from 28 countries. Many of them conducted several reviews, including revisions of earlier versions where their continued input is invaluable. Their – your – contribution is essential in making ReCALL a top journal as reviewers become increasingly hard to find. The mean time in review is an entirely respectable 30 days (SD = 24); delays come from finding reviewers who agree, and occasionally chasing up slow cases; to give you an idea, we also had 104 invitations declined, and a further 35 received no response. So our profound thanks to all those who did complete reviews:
Muhammad Abdel Latif, Zsuzsanna Abrams, Müge Adnan, Minoo Alemi, Margarita Alonso-Ramos, Maria Iosifina Avgousti, Oliver Ballance, Zsuzsanna Bárkányi, Neil Barrett, Francesca Bianchi, Kate Borthwick, Camino Bueno-Alastuey, Jack Burston, Fidel Çakmak, Silvia Canto, Catherine G. Caws, Hao-Jan Chen, Weina Chen, Yuah Chon, Nuttakritta Chotipaktanasook, Letizia Cinganotto, Milo Coffey, Alejandro Curado Fuentes, Robert Dilenschneider, Vera Dugartsyrenova, Anna Dziemianko, Mohsen Ebrahimzadeh, Idée Edalatishams, Linda Edwards, Alannah Fitzgerald, Luciana Forti, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia, Kolbrún Friðriksdóttir, Anca Frumuselu, Luke Fryer, Tesni Galvin, Chuan Gao, Tesfaye Gezahegn, John Gillespie, Marta Giralt, Nasim Googol, Mar Gutiérrez-Colón, Stella Hadjistassou, Gregory Hadley, Marwa Hafour, Regine Hampel, Zoe Handley, Alice Henderson, Phil Hubbard, Peter Ilic, Sake Jager, Juhyun Jang, Jenny Lin Jiang, Michael Yi-Chao Jiang, Ann Jones, Andrea Kárpáti, Brent Kelsen, Vita Kogan, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Gosia Kurek, Yuda Lai, Bradford Lee, Jinyoung Lee, Sangmin Lee, Joyce Lim, Chih-Chung Lin, Yeu-Ting Liu, Kacper Łodzikowski, Boning Lyu, Kinga Maior, Marni Manegre, S. Susan Marandi, Alfred Markey, Michael McLaren, Paul Meara, Bing Mei, Chloe Mills, Charles Mueller, Nicholas Musty, Barbara Muszynska, Maarit Mutta, Susanna Nocchi, Caoimhín Ó Dónaill, Robert O’Dowd, Breffni O’Rourke, Shila Panadgoo, Mirosław Pawlak, hongying Peng, Robert Poole, Wei Ren, Elaine Riordan, Ornaith Rodgers, Esperanza Román-Mendoza, Fernando Rosell-Aguilar, María Jesús Sánchez, Takeshi Sato, Perihan Savaş, Nastassia Schutz, Jaime Selwood, Rustam Shadiev, Natalia Shalaeva, Jonathan Smart, Paul Stapleton, Peppi Taalas, Guy Trainin, Joshua Underwood, Miguel Varela, Nina Vyatkina, Ciara R. Wigham, Di Zou.
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We’re looking forward to the May issue this year on the theme of “Replication in CALL,” guest edited by Cornelia Tschichold (Swansea University, UK). As we try to publish a special issue every two years or so, you can expect a new call for guest editors in the next few months. In the meantime, we have a selection of excellent papers for you here, beginning with a wide-reaching article by Laia Canals and Yishay Mor who attempt to define pedagogical principles – a “signature pedagogy” – for technology within a task-based approach. Their two-stage consultation produced a final list ranging from learning by doing to (authentic) language use and meaning-focused activities, as well as technology-specific principles; the hope is that integrating theoretical and epistemological aspects can help researchers, teachers and others involved in task-based CALL.
We then have a set of three papers that foreground the teacher, the first two involving language corpora. In a large-scale study finally involving 183 teachers and trainees, Qing Ma, Ming Ming Chiu, Shanru Lin and Norman B. Mendoza introduced corpora and examined uptake via extensive questionnaires and structural equation modelling. They propose and rank five key factors for corpus literacy, with search skills emerging as the most important. Nicole Schmidt provided a seven-week workshop for writing teachers with varying levels of experience. Each designed and implemented data-driven learning activities; analysis of their reflective diaries using the TPACK framework uncovered two main approaches with implications for future training courses: planners tend to stick to their agenda, whereas seekers are more open to improvisation. More widely, Zeynep Bilki, Müge Satar and Mehmet Sak examine critical digital literacy among UK/Turkey language teachers during a virtual exchange. This emic study found that the weekly reports highlighted a number of important aspects (self-representation, inclusiveness, building connections and the socio-political landscape) that can inform such increasingly common exchanges.
A second set of papers focuses on speech, starting with speech recognition technology, where 26 recent studies are reviewed by Rustam Shadiev and Jiawen Liu. Descriptively, Dragon Naturally Speaking and Google were the most popular, especially for giving feedback. The evaluation compared positive features (notably for progress in the language itself, including pronunciation and skills, along with perceptions) with negative ones (low accuracy and specific features and functions). Solène Inceoglu, Wen-Hsin Chen and Hyojung Lim compare speech recognition technology against human comprehension of L2 learners. In both cases, recognition is higher for sentences than for individual words, though the native speaker listeners outperformed Google Assistant on sentences but not on individual words (the differences were not dramatic in either case). Intriguingly, the error types were very similar, and the results are highly variable from one individual speaker to another. For comprehension by L2 learners, Chen Chi, Hao-Jan Howard Chen, Wen-Ta Tseng and Yeu-Ting Liu showed videos with full or partial captions accompanied by animations or static key frames to test cognitive load among four groups of learners. The results show that different combinations may have their own advantages, depending on the type of comprehension targeted (global or detailed), thus going some way toward explaining divergent accounts in the existing literature. The final paper by Nazlı Ceren Cirit-Işıklıgil, Randall W. Sadler and Elif Arıca-Akkök is also comparative, but here between videoconferencing, virtual words and face-to-face contexts, with the focus on communication strategies. Each group of five participants made use of similar strategies in every environment, but with more strategies in total in videoconferencing, fewest in virtual worlds – surprisingly, perhaps, with face-to-face sitting between the two, underlining again that not all technologies are equal in their affordances. A number of new strategies are also described.
We hope you enjoy this issue, and wish you all the best for 2023 as a year of opportunities and dreams fulfilled.
