Editorial

Abstract

Nobody expected an international lockdown in 2020, much less for it to continue into 2021; I certainly did not expect to be writing of this again for January 2022. As many of us have got used to teaching from home, so research in the classroom has diminished, giving way to online or hybrid formats that have generated considerable food for thought, as well as research output. Much of this, however, has been ad hoc, comparing previous course formats against current constraints, with computers and other technology largely given over to this online condition rather than pushing the boundaries of research in CALL. In terms of submissions to ReCALL, the results have been three-fold: (a) a somewhat higher rejection rate; (b) a slightly slower time from submission to acceptance, as reviewers have been more difficult to find; (c) a delay in accepted papers being assigned to an issue – although they are of course available online as soon as they are ready (see FirstView articles). This last point has yet to really be felt, but to pre-empt future delays we have decided to increase the number of papers in each issue. Assuming the rate of submissions returns to pre-COVID levels, this will allow us to catch up with the backlog and make the situation a little more comfortable for special issues in the future. This year, Cambridge University Press instigated a new prize for the “best” ReCALL paper published in the preceding year (issues 32.3 to 33.2), although “best” is of course a delicate question. The editors drew up a shortlist of two papers from each issue to be voted on by the full editorial board, the prize this year being awarded to Christine Appel and Joan-Tomàs Pujolà for their paper in issue 33.2 titled “Designing Speaking Interaction in LMOOCs: An eTandem Approach” – congratulations to them! And indeed to all the other contributors who make ReCALL one of the top journals in its field. On this topic, the annual JCR impact factor for ReCALL is encouraging, increasing by 58% from 1.842 in 2019 to 2.917 in 2020, with a consequent rise to 21st place among all linguistics journals. That said, other journals are also increasing their IF, suggesting that more research overall has been published during COVID; certainly more people are downloading papers from ReCALL. And, as always, we need to be careful with overinterpreting any bibliometrics. In other news, many of you will have seen the call for papers for a ReCALL special issue on Replication in CALL to be guest edited by Cornelia Tschichold (Swansea University, UK). The deadline for submission of full papers is the 15th May 2022, and please do get in touch with her if you have any questions. The issue itself is due out as ReCALL 35.2 in May 2023. Also, we discovered that a special issue of ReCALL from 1998 titled Language Processing in CALL was missing from the journal homepage; our thanks to Cornelia Tschichold for noticing this, the editors of the issue for agreeing to its publication (Mathias Schulze, Marie-Josée Hamel and June Thompson), and CUP for making it fully available. Last year saw the introduction of a newsletter timed to coincide with the publication of each new issue, featuring a short introduction and links to the latest articles – something we’d been planning to do for years but only finally got around to during COVID. The EUROCALL conference held virtually in Paris in August 2021 saw an editors’ workshop hosted by Shona Whyte and David Barr from ReCALL, along with representatives from seven other CALL journals. The topic, “Reviewing CALL research”, is of course of major interest for both reviewers and authors as well as editors; the