2009 marked the twentieth anniversary of ReCALL. Initially published by the CTI Centre for Modern Languages at the University of Hull (UK), the journal has become over the last two decades an important reference not only for EUROCALL members, but also for the wider CALL community. The availability of its early issues (volumes 1–11) through the Cambridge Journals Online Archive Project and the addition of Scopus to the impressive list of abstracting and indexing services already covering the journal are some of the latest developments in the history of our journal. The evolution of ReCALL in the last twenty years also reflects the maturity that CALL research has now reached. While pedagogical innovation and materials development continue to be a thriving object of inquiry and scholarship, the rapid advancement and adoption of digital technologies in our daily life has led the CALL community to engage in activities beyond the development of language learning courseware prevalent in the early nineties. CALL research is now firmly established as an interdisciplinary field drawing on and contributing to the advancement of knowledge in cognate areas such as Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Intercultural and Translation Studies, Education and Educational Technologies, Natural Language Processing and Communication Studies to mention but a few. As it seeks to further our understanding of the role of information and communication technology in language education and to improve formal and informal language learning, CALL research continues to expand into new areas, to create and refine its own theoretical and methodological frameworks, and to return significant findings and innovation, which are evaluated according to the rigorous criteria that are commonplace in other disciplines.
Scholarship, originality, significance and rigour are indeed evident in the papers included in this issue, which as usual are evidence of the interdisciplinary nature of our field and the wide range of theoretical and methodological paradigms that underpin CALL activities. These papers illustrate how CALL research is informed by and contributes to cognate areas such as Human Computer Interaction (Kenning), Second Language Acquisition (Yilmaz & Granena, Sasaki & Takeuchi), Educational technology (Ros i Solé, Calic & Neijmann), Teacher education (Hong), and Corpus Linguistics (Wu, Franken & Witten). Marie-Madeleine Kenning critically reviews the treatment of variables in the CMC literature and the consequent claims made on the benefits of text and voice chat. Her particular focus on the functionalities and affordances of synchronous environments leads her to call for well documented studies highlighting the degree of contingency of findings and the significant factors that impact on the nature and outcomes of interactions taking place in such environments. Continuing with the theme of synchronous CMC, Yucel Yilmaz and Gisela Granena explore the effects of two task types, jigsaw and dictagloss, on the occurrence and nature of Language Related Episodes (LREs), where learners attend to form. Their study shows that although both task types elicit instances of focus on form, the generated LREs differ, both quantitatively and qualitatively, according to the task type. Kwang Hee Hong explores the role of CALL teacher education in the integration of technology in the language classroom and points to possible avenues for future research in this area, while Christina Ros i Solé and her colleagues investigate emerging social, personal, and language learning practices in relation to mobile technologies.
Asynchronous communication provides a context for Second Language Acquisition inquiry, whether underpinned by interactionist or sociocultural theories. In their study on vocabulary development in the context email exchanges between Japanese learners of English and their tutor, a native speaker of English; Akihiko Sasaki and Osamu Takeuchi show that learners retained some of the lexical items that have been provided by the tutor not only through imitation in the Zone of Proximal Development, but also, and perhaps more significantly, through repeated exposure in a variety of contexts and through the use of multiple cognitive processes and strategies. Vocabulary development also underpins the development and evaluation by Shaoqun Wu, Margaret Franken and Ian Witten of an innovative concordancing system helping students to retrieve and use collocations effectively.
Stop Press
As this issue is going to press, we learn that ReCALL is now appearing on the Thompson ISI ‘new journals’ list for the Social Sciences Citation index. In addition to featuring on the Linguistics list (its main category), ReCALL is also listed in the Education and Educational Resources list.
