The most striking feature of the year has of course been the health crisis with Covid-19, leading to a lockdown in many countries around the world and consequent changes in teaching and research. This led to a bumper crop of submissions to ReCALL, up 25% year on year. Many are of high quality, though it is notable that those specifically addressing the issues involved in online teaching during the confinement were conducted under difficult conditions and with varying outcomes. Gender equality was a potential issue, as it had noted in other fields that women bore many of the additional burdens of lockdown, with childcare and home schooling in particular. Unfortunately, this is very likely to be true in many individual cases; however, I am glad to report that there does not seem to be a general trend in ReCALL. I compared the apparent gender of lead authors from 1 March to 31 July 2020, the key period of confinement, against the same period in 2019. Though a fairly rough-and-ready measure and susceptible to error, the overall F/M rate seems to be up very slightly from 52.2% to 53.8%. The difference is too small to be statistically meaningful, but is at least a reassuring indication that Covid-19 has not led to a more male-centric submission rate. Of course, this doesn’t tell us if there’s a gender bias in normal times, or indeed any other type of unacknowledged discrimination. Simply hoping for the best is not enough, and we do need to be on our guard. This may be one feature that could usefully be addressed by all major CALL journals in a new initiative launched by Jozef Colpaert (editor of Computer Assisted Language Learning) titled International Network of Editors in CALL. INEC is intended to facilitate cooperation between editors of relevant journals on various issues of policy, terminology, topics, methodology, and logistics, as well as common activities such as joint workshops on best practice at major conferences. It’s very early days yet though; watch this space!
An important planned step beginning with this issue is that ReCALL has decided to go entirely online, abandoning the print publications which had been dropping off steeply (fewer than 100 copies were distributed in 2018) as practices change to reflect online reading. Full-article downloads in 2019 were a tad shy of 40,000, a 12% increase for each of the last two years. ReCALL’s impact factor as calculated by Clarivate Analytics has risen from 1.361 to 1.842 in 2019; the journal maintains its place alongside the top journals in CALL, and ranks 31st among journals in linguistics as a whole. While it’s always pleasing to report positive figures, we need to be cautious in interpreting such metrics and attributing more to them than they truly warrant. Finally, following the Editorial Board meeting in August during the annual EUROCALL conference (held online, as the entire Copenhagen event was inevitably conducted remotely), a third of members of the Editorial Board have been renewed; the list is on the journal homepage and the inside front cover.
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 – 162 individuals from 27 countries over the year from October 2019 to September 2020 inclusive. Many of them conducted several reviews, including revisions of earlier versions where their continued input is invaluable. My grateful thanks to them all in making ours a top journal. They are: Zsuzsanna Abrams, Müge Adnan, Saad Alzahrani, Mohammad Amiryousefi, Alberto Andujar, Christine Appel, Jorge Arús, Maria Iosifina Avgousti, Su Jin Bae, Arif Bakla, Oliver Ballance, Elena Barcena, Zsuzsanna Barkanyi, Daniela Bartalesi-Graf, Tita Beaven, Elaine Beirne, Anke Berns, Chesla Ann Bohinski, Kate Borthwick, Linda Bradley, Neil Briggs, Jack Burston, Fidel Çakmak, Silvia Canto, M. Dolores Castrillo, Catherine G. Caws, Angela Chambers, Alvin Cheng-Hsien Chen, Hao-Jan Chen, Xaio-Bin Chen, Francesca Coccetta, Josez Colpaert, Anna Comas-Quinn, Barbara Conde Gafaro, Frederik Cornillie, Elena Cotos, Peter Crosthwaite, Alejandro Curado Fuentes, Euline Cutrim Schmid, Farzaneh Dehghan, Robert Dilenschneider, Cristina Diordieva, Dan Douglas, Raymond Echitchi, Khaled Elebyary, Fiona Farr, Jo Fayram, Alannah Fitzgerald, Luciana Forti, Kolbrún Friðriksdóttir, Odette Gabaudan, Chuan Gao, Joe Geluso, John Gillespie, Ana Gimeno, Senta Goertler, Cecilia Goria, Muriel Grosbois, Mar Gutiérrez-Colón, Gregory Hadley, Eric Hagley, Regine Hampel, Hsiang-ling Huang, Zeping Huang, Phil Hubbard, Neil Hughes, Francisco Iniesto, Yasushige Ishikawa, Sake Jager, Juhyun Jang, Kristi Jauregi, Stephen Jeaco, Dayu Jiang, Napat Jitpaisarnwattana, Ann Jones, Andrea Kárpáti, Jemma König, Kirsi Korkealehto, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Gosia Kurek, Shu-Li Lai, Yu-Ju Lan, Brenda Lee, Jang Ho Lee, Jennifer Lertola, Mimi Li, Stephanie Link, Pekka Lintunen, Rong Luo, Conchúr Mac Lochlainn, François Mangenot, Alfred Markey, Antonio Martínez Sáez, Sara Matlack, Shannon McCrocklin, Chris McGuirk, Julia Miller, Chloe Mills, Liam Murray, Barbara Muszynska, Maarit Mutta, Anna Nicolaou, Caoimhín Ó Dónaill, Robert O’Dowd, Breffni O’Rourke, Takeshi Okada, Marina Orsini-Jones, Ana Oskoz, Panagiotis Panagiotidis, salomi papadima-sophocleous, Justine Paris, hongying Peng, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Joanna Pitura, Alessia Plutino, Joan-Tomàs Pujolà, Natasha Randall, Timothy Read, Hayo Reinders, Randi Reppen, Irina Rets, Fernando Rubio, Noelia Ruiz-Madrid, Ayse Saliha, Cédric Sarré, Beatriz Sedano, Natalia Shalaeva, Lijing Shi, Jonathan Smart, Maggie Sokolik, Jeong-Bae Son, Glenn Stockwell, Neomy Storch, Brian Strong, Ross Sundberg, Pawel Szudarski, Anaïs Tack, Osamu Takeuchi, Masahiro Takimoto, Chiachieh Tang, Benjamin Thanyawatpokin, Michael Thomas, Guy Trainin, Cornelia Tschichold, Joshua Underwood, Huub van den Bergh, Julie Van der Vyver, Robert Vanderplank, Margarita Vinagre, Benet Vincent, Nina Vyatkina, Yi-Hsuan Wang, Shona Whyte, Adriana Wilde, Ariel Wu, Shaoqun Wu, Chunsheng Yang, Bedrettin Yazan, Eric Young, Danyang Zhang, Tong Zhao, Bin Zou.
Finally, I’m looking forward to the next issue (33.2) on the theme of “Researching massive open online courses for language teaching and learning”, guest edited by Elena Martín-Monje (UNED, Spain) and Kate Borthwick (University of Southampton, UK).
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This issue opens with three papers on reading, writing and corpus use. Oliver James Balance extends the usual sense of ‘narrow reading’, i. e. a series of texts on the same topic to increase familiarity with both subject and language, especially from lexical repetition. The question he asks is whether concordances offer similar affordances. His analysis of standardised type-token ratio provides a positive answer, depending on the level of homogeneity among texts in the corpus itself. In other words, use of a focused corpus can reduce vocabulary load and increase exposure to target items in multiple contexts, essential for learning collocations. When it comes to writing, machine translation elicits mixed reactions, as Sangmin-Michelle Lee and Neil Briggs point out: a reflex for many learners but condemned by teachers. Advances in the quality of output mean that it should not be ignored, however, at least as an additional resource during revision, as studied here. A first translation was subsequently corrected after comparing with Google Translate output; this helped in reducing error rates across the board, and especially in noun phrases, including articles, prepositions and plurals. While such tools are not a substitute for human help, they can draw attention to potential problem areas for further exploration, and can foster higher-level thinking processes. Teacher training is clearly crucial in the uptake of new tools, as explored by Muhammad M. M. Abdel Latif for corpus literacy immediately after training and two years later; such longitudinal follow-up is of great value but vanishingly rare. Despite enthusiasm on both occasions, there was limited impact on actual practice; the findings are analysed and interpreted on different dimensions.
Representations and experiences also feature in the study by James York, Koichi Shibata, Hayato Tokutake and Hiroshi Nakayama, here with students’ anxiety with different uses of CALL rather than the usual experimental/control group comparison – an important conceptual change which we are starting to see more of in CALL research designs. All three types of synchronous computer-mediated communication (voice, video, virtual reality) reduced anxiety; though differences in post-task anxiety were not significant, there were certainly variations in perception that can be exploited. The last two papers both concern mobile-assisted language learning and how learners go about interacting with such tools. First, Wei-Chieh Fang, Hui-Chin Yeh, Bo-Ru Luo and Nian-Shing Chen looked at the effects of scaffolding in task-based language learning for conversation on smartphones among lower-level learners. They found not only that their approach was more effective in terms of outcomes on all three measures (vocabulary, comprehension, and grammar though not significantly so on the latter), but also that it fostered strategy awareness and the negotiation of meaning. Strategies are also at the core of the paper by Chuan Gao and Hui-zhong Shen which closes this issue. The use of MALL here led to deployment of a new set of strategies compared to what would be found in traditional teacher-fronted, exam-oriented face-to-face teaching. They clustered in particular into metacognitive, commitment and environmental control strategies in follow-up interviews, with implications for designing MALL tools for autonomous use.
I know the entire Editorial Board and everyone involved in ReCALL will join me in wishing you not only a fruitful and productive new year for your research, but a safe one too, in bodily and mental health. Good luck with all your endeavours.
