ReCALL is published by Cambridge University Press but owned by EUROCALL, who updated their mission statement this year. To reflect this, ReCALL has also taken a look at its aims and scope and made a number of changes; the new text features on the inside front cover and on the journal homepage, as does the list of people participating in work for ReCALL. Continuing the policy established in 2016, a third of the members of the Editorial Board have been contacted to renew their membership; among the Associate Editors, Linda Bradley and Frederik Cornillie have had to stand down due to changing work commitments. They will not be leaving us entirely though, as both have agreed to stay on the Editorial Board. Pascual Pérez-Paredes and Shona Whyte join us as Associate Editors in their stead, and both have been assigned their first papers within the ScholarOne system – a steep learning curve at the start! Our heartfelt thanks to all concerned for the work they do.
This year we sought proposals from Guest Editors for a new special issue of ReCALL to be published in 2021. Four high-quality projects were submitted, and after discussion by the Editorial Board during the annual EUROCALL conference in Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, the proposal by Elena Martín-Monje (UNED, Spain) and Kate Borthwick (University of Southampton, UK) was accepted on the topic “Researching massive open online courses for language teaching and learning.” The call for papers is now out, and we look forward to receiving your submissions.
ReCALL’s impact factor, as calculated by Clarivate Analytics, has dropped from 2.206 to 1.361 in 2018, slightly above the figure for 2015. This might sound disappointing, but ReCALL is still among the top journals in CALL and in the top 50 journals in linguistics as a whole. More telling, nearly 3,000 articles were downloaded from ReCALL every month in 2018. There are good reasons to be wary of impact factor and other bibliometric measures, as I noted last January when the figures were higher: “While such metrics have their uses, they also have their limits, especially in fields such as human and social sciences with relatively low figures: what counts is the quality of submissions and publications in providing first-class research in the field.” The low numbers in fields such as linguistics mean that major fluctuations are inevitable and partly random, and not particularly meaningful: it might be likened to asking someone if they would like 1.4 or 2.2 grains of sugar in their coffee – you would be hard pressed to taste the difference. So why are the scores so low in linguistics and related fields? First, in the main calculation, any references that are more than two years old do not contribute to the impact factor of the sources cited. In linguistics, the half-life of publication is more than 10 years (i.e. half the references are more than 10 years old), as the field does not evolve as fast as in, say, biology or psychology, and it can be important to establish continuity by referring to older work. Second, the turnaround in linguistics is generally quite slow: if a paper takes two years from submission to publication, any references again will not contribute to the impact factor. In fields such as biochemistry, it is not uncommon for papers to appear online within a month of submission. In ReCALL, and other journals, all I can say is that we try to be as quick as possible but could always do better. Anyway, the point is that a high impact factor is always nice, but we should be careful not to rely too heavily on it. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA; https://sfdora.org/) provides a thought-provoking take on this and on institutional pressures to publish in certain journals.
As is usual in the first issue of the year, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following reviewers of submissions to ReCALL for their contribution from October 2018 to September 2019 inclusive: Zsuzsanna Abrams, Müge Adnan, Abdelhamid Ahmed, Haiyang Ai, Yuka Akiyama, Maha Alghasab, Laurence Anthony, Maria Iosifina Avgousti, Ufuk Balaman, Elena Bárcena, Anke Berns, Françoise Blin, Jill Boggs, Chesla Ann Bohinski, Paul Booth, Kate Borthwick, Hossein Bozorgian, Jack Burston, Fidel Çakmak, Silvia Canto, Catherine G. Caws, Rubén Chacón-Beltrán, Angela Chambers, Mei-Mei Chang, Anne Chateau, Alvin Cheng-Hsien Chen, Hao-Jan Chen, Kate Tzu-Ching Chen, Mei-Hua Chen, Chin-Wen Chien, Emrullah Yasin Çiftçi, Elena Cotos, Averil Coxhead, Peter Crosthwaite, Niall Curry, Euline Cutrim Schmid, Massimiliano Demata, Kevin Devoss, Robert Dilenschneider, Ozgur Dogan, Melinda Dooly, Saman Ebadi, Fiona Farr, Jo Fayram, Alannah Fitzgerald, Marta Fondo García, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia, Chuan Gao, John Gillespie, Senta Goertler, Marta González-Lloret, Sean Grant, Maria Guapacha, Signe Hannibal Jensen, Hora Fatemeh Hedayati, Francesca Helm, Zeping Huang, Phil Hubbard, Neil Hughes, Ana Ibáñez, Sake Jager, Kristi Jauregi, Stephen Jeaco, Andrea Kárpáti, Liudmila Kimanova, Kimberley Klassen, Janine Knight, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Gosia Kurek, Tracy Lee, Mike Levy, Robert Lew, Meei-Ling Liaw, Phoebe Lin, Yeu-Ting Liu, Hasaan Mahdi, Jeffrey Maloney, François Mangenot, Maribel Montero Perez, Charles Mueller, Liam Murray, Maarit Mutta, Tatsuya Nakata, Neasa Ní Chiaráin, Susanna Nocchi, Caoimhín Ó Dónaill, Marina Orsini-Jones, Ana Oskoz, Salomi Papadima-Sophocleous, Moonyoung Park, Ward Peeters, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Joanna Pitura, Alain Polguère, Julio Rodríguez, Esperanza Román-Mendoza, Ali Roohani, Fernando Rosell-Aguilar, Björn Rudzewitz, H. Müge Satar, Shannon Sauro, Perihan Savaş, Nastassia Schutz, Natalia Shalaeva, Geoff Sockett, Ursula Stickler, Glenn Stockwell, Benjamin Thanyawatpokin, Ophélie Tremblay, Ruth Trinder, Joshua Underwood, Julie Van Der Vyver, Margarita Vinagre, Nina Vyatkina, Shona Whyte, Scott Windeatt, Sascha Wolfer, Ariel Wu, Shaoqun Wu, Chunsheng Yang, Jie Chi Yang, Eric Young, Dima Yousef, Gang Zeng.
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Several themes are common to more than one paper in this issue, notably the shared concepts in the variously named telecollaboration, virtual exchange, online interaction and computer-mediated communication, as well as cross-cultural communication and intercultural exchange. In their open-access paper, Melinda Dooly and Randall Sadler look at the teacher’s perspective in training for telecollaboration between two universities in Spain and the USA. The focus was on flipped, in-class, and telecollaborative work, with an emic take on the processes involved. Two participants were closely “shadowed”, and the carefully transcribed extracts show the need to take responsibility for one’s learning and connect theory and practice at all times, among other things. Also in Spain, the paper by Janine Knight, Melinda Dooly and Elena Barberà looked at interactions between six pairs of intermediate-level students in online simulations around a job interview. Rather than the usual focus on language, the researchers adopted a semiotic analysis of the interactions to look at how the participants initiated and responded using the various tools available in this computer-mediated communicative situation.
The affordances of online tools are evidenced in the other papers too. Ju Seong Lee examines the uses Korean learners make of the internet for English via questionnaires in three different universities from 266 participants who had never been abroad. Use of “informal digital learning of English” (IDLE) was lower than expected (generally “rare”; i.e. once a week) but correlated with two other scores. Intriguingly, the author managed to pinpoint directionality: IDLE practices had a positive impact on self-reported strategic competence for cross-cultural communication, partly mediated by their perceptions of different varieties of English. Also in Korea and the USA, mobile phones were used by 54 students to communicate individually and in small groups in a project by Juhee Lee and Jayoung Song over eight weeks. Written chats showed little difference in frequency or quantity of interaction, while voice or face chats were used more extensively in individual than group communication. Feedback showed that students favoured the individual contact on all six scales. In general, it was found that one-on-one communication fostered closer relationships, thus lending themselves to linguistic and emotional issues, whereas group contact worked better for cross-cultural issues. In her paper on collaborative writing, Yi Chin Hsieh asked 28 pairs of students in Taiwan to write a first essay without resources, and a second one with access to a shared computer. Generally, she found that online resources fostered collaboration, though this was largely dependent upon the students’ predisposition towards such work. A detailed analysis reveals emerging characteristics of the interactions, such as increased metatalk. The final paper by Levi McNeil looks at the impact of various digital games for language learning among 16 Korean women majoring in applied linguistics. From gaming journals and surveys, it was found that the activity as a whole led to increased language awareness. Six of the students actively participated in gaming discourses, partly due to the limited nature of such interactive spaces, although the relationships formed there could also be a positive experience.
