2015 has been another good year for ReCALL, with ever-increasing numbers of submissions, and encouraging biometrics. The impact factor has gone up every year since it was first calculated in 2011; it currently stands at 1.378, making it the top international CALL journal this year. JCR also ranks it in the first quartile for the entire fields of both linguistics and education. We have also renewed our contract with CUP, whose website offers a new metrics option for authors to visualise views of their abstract and full paper over time, with links to related articles.
It is now over a year since the entire submission, reviewing and editing process passed over to the ScholarOne online system; it has been a steep learning curve but life is now much simpler, faster and more transparent for authors, reviewers, editors and journal administrator. Two further changes are imminent in our revamping of editorial and reviewing practices. First, we are delighted that David Barr and Frederik Cornillie have agreed to join us as associate editors, and warmly welcome them aboard. Second, we expect that their arrival will allow us to streamline the editorial board, which reaches the end of its three-year mandate on 31 December 2015. At the time of going to press, no specific decisions have been reached, but we plan to switch to a rotating system whereby a third of the board comes up for renewal every three years. Our grateful thanks to all those who have served over the years, not just in reviewing papers but in contributing to discussions both online and face-to-face; ReCALL would not be the journal it is today without their tremendously valuable input.
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In the wake of the special issue 26(2) of ReCALL 2014 on Researching uses of corpora for language teaching and learning, we have received a large number of submissions on data-driven learning, three of which feature in this issue. Charles M. Mueller and Natalia D. Jacobsen present two experiments with Japanese learners of English using the Corpus of Contemporary American English as an aide to revising their writing. With little previous experience of corpus use, the participants did not necessarily find the work easy, but received it favourably and managed better scores on most target items with a corpus rather than a dictionary as a reference resource. An experimental approach to EFL corpus work also features in the paper by Azizullah Mirzaei, Masoud Rahimi Domakani and Sedigheh Rahimi, but here with school-age learners in Iran. The results suggest that their LexisBOARD tool successfully promoted a lexical approach as compared to the control group. Hyeyoung Cho adopted a more ecological approach in exploring the effects of collaboration during different types of corpus consultation. Recordings of these researchers’ interactions and subsequent interviews suggest that collaboration is useful for conceptual tasks such as comparing close synonyms in corpus data, but that individual consultation may be better suited for procedural tasks such as using those items in translation.
The final two papers in this issue look at different aspects of online communication. Nicolas Guichon and Ciara R. Wigham examine the role of images in telecollaboration between business students in Ireland and trainee teachers in France, with French as the target language. Analysis of the framing and transcript data along with interviews shows that frames including the whole torso allow more effective communication by including a wider range of gestures than more close-up shots. Business students also participated in the study by Ruth Trinder in Austria, which found that they make considerable informal use of different types of ICT for a variety of purposes including for English, and are increasingly aware of their usefulness for language study. Nonetheless, technology is clearly no panacea, and factors explaining a preference for face-to-face contact in some cases are discussed.
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The editors would like to thank the following reviewers of submissions to ReCALL for their contribution in 2014–2015:
David Barr, Yvonne Breyer, Judith Buendgens-Kosten, Jack Burston, Silvia Canto, Monica Stella Cardenas-Claros, Catherine Caws, Angela Chambers, Thierry Chanier, Maggie Charles, Anne Chateau, Kiyomi Chujo, Tom Cobb, Anna Comas Quinn, Christelle Combe Célik, Frederik Cornillie, Euline Cutrim Schmid, Melinda Dooly, Helga Dorner, Fiona Farr, Robert Fischer, Lynne Flowerdew, Cathy Fowley, John Gillespie, Ana Gimeno, Sandra Götz, Nicolas Guichon, Marie-Josée Hamel, Regine Hampel, Mirjam Hauck, Liwei Hsu, Hsin-Chou Huang, Phil Hubbard, Meltern Huri Baturay, Kristi Jauregi, Andrea Kárpáti, Chao-Jung Ko, Martin Lamb, Corinne Landure, Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska, Mike Levy, Hsien-Chin Liou, David Little, Xiaofei Lu, Vera Menezes, Detmar Meurers, Maribel Montero Perez, Carlos Montoro, Gary Motteram, Marina Mozzon-McPherson, Andreas Müller-Hartmann, Liam Murray, David Neville, Elke Nissen, Robert O’Dowd, Ana Oskoz, Sue Otto, Luisa Panichi, Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Joséphine Rémon, Dongwan Ryu, Randall Sadler, Müge Satar, Shannon Sauro, Mathias Schulze, Simon Smith, Geoff Sockett, Stavroula Sokoli, Glenn Stockwell, Carola Strobl, Yu-Chih Sun, Peppi Taalas, Osamu Takeuchi, Maija Tammelin, Cornelia Tschichold, Nina Vyatkina, Mei-jung Wang, Sylvia Warnecke, Ciara Wigham, Jie Chi Yang, Dogan Yuksel.
