Looking at the Contents list for this issue of ReCALL, I notice that several of these papers have taken rather longer than I would normally expect in their progression from submission to publication. The reasons for this can vary. In some cases, the reviewing process may have to be repeated if, for example, substantial rewriting is required. In others, it is simply a matter of timing: the May issue usually contains as many as possible of the selected papers from the previous year’s EUROCALL conference, so that some of the ‘regular’ submissions are held over until the September issue. In fact, a small number of papers from the EUROCALL 2008 conference in Hungary are still at the revision stage, and will appear in next year’s volume.
The one conference paper in this current issue is by Melinda Dooly, covering research into the long-term impact of the integration into teacher training courses of various ICT projects. Issues such as the dichotomy between what the trainees learn in their courses and the actual teaching environment in which they may find themselves are highlighted in the findings. Teacher training has long been recognised as a crucial factor in the development of CALL, and it is gratifying to note that this is being taken seriously, in terms of both practical applications and of research.
As a result of the ‘serendipitous’ process outlined above, I find that this issue covers an extremely diverse set of topics, illustrating several creative and sophisticated approaches to CALL development and research. Carmen Pérez Basanta and María Moreno Jaén take a multimodal approach to the teaching of foreign language conversation skills by means of the use of DVD clips, drawing on conversations taken from films. Their findings suggest that learners do benefit from being ‘plunged into the world of native speakers’ in this way. Marty Meinardi’s article concentrates on the use of a digital slow-down tool which assists non-native speakers in listening to authentic speech, whilst Ali Farhan AbuSeileek explores the learning of grammar both inductively and deductively, with and without computers. The findings indicate that the success of the different combinations of learning methods depends largely upon the complexity of the grammar structures being tackled. Finally, the paper by Riitta Kosunen explores how students on a university course on language pedagogy made use of computer-mediated conferencing for collaborative text processing, in preparation for a reflective essay. This study generated a number of questions for further investigation, such as how aware students are of different modes of discourse, and to what extent they shift between them in different media.
As ever, we are most grateful to all the reviewers who work tirelessly on our behalf to help authors bring their articles to the pages of ReCALL.
Reviewers for Volume 21
The editors would like to thank the following reviewers for their contribution to the preparation of Volume 21:
David Barr, Angela Chambers, Thierry Chanier, Carol Chapelle, Graham Davies, Wilfried Decoo, Robert Debski, Robert Fischer, Nina Garrett, John Gillespie, Ana Gimeno, Michael Goethals, Trude Heift, Dominique Hémard, Phil Hubbard, Marie-Noëlle Lamy, Michael Levy, Peter Liddell, David Little, Vera Menezes, Robert O'Dowd, Sue Otto, Mathias Schulze, Lesley Shield, Glenn Stockwell, Peppi Taalas, Maija Tammelin, Dieter Wolff.
