From the Editors

Greetings,

As past editor, Maggie Sokolik, mentioned in the previous issue, Thomas Robb has now assumed the editorship. We are eternally grateful to Maggie for labors for over twenty-two years, since issue 1.1 of the Journal in April of 1994.

As Editor, it is my job to perform an initial filtering of the submissions so that only those that meet the basic qualifications for a publishable manuscript are passed on to the co-editors who assign the reviewers for each submission. We need to ensure that we do no squander our valuable reviewer resource on manuscripts that are clearly not relevant to the TESL-EJ readership, or are lacking in one or more of the essential aspects of a publishable academic article. Furthermore, the editor needs to see that the review process is carried out expeditiously, and then, along with the co-editors and the reviewers, determine whether the manuscript should be accepted for publication.

This is a challenging age. Publication in quality journals is no longer merely something one does for one’s own professional curiosity, or as a requirement for job maintenance or promotion; an increasingly large number of universities outside of the Western tradition are requiring a published article as a requirement for a Ph.D., and in some cases, even an M.A. degree. This is putting even greater pressure on journals to increase their ‘through put’ in order to provide professional feedback on submissions, and prepare accepted articles in a timely manner. Our aim at TESL-EJ is to reduce the turn around time from initial submission to either acceptance or rejection to six months or less.

In order to do so, we need the help of our readers. Not only do we need more qualified reviewers, we also need more dedicated individuals to facilitate the ‘shepherding process’ – assigning reviewers, communicating with authors, compiling the feedback from reviewers and following up on those who are slow to respond. We welcome more professionals to join us in either of these two roles. Please contact the editor if you are interested and including your CV so that we can best assess how you can best serve our editorial team.

This edition of TESL-EJ features a variety of articles of teaching theory, policy and practice. Enjoy!

Thomas Robb, Editor,
for the entire editorial team

TESL-EJ Special Issue
Second Language Teacher Education (to appear February 2019*)

Guest Editor: Thomas S.C. Farrell

Call For Papers: Second Language Teacher Education

As a relatively new and growing profession, second language teacher education (SLTE) has evolved over the past few decades. Indeed, SLTE has taken on a more global perspective and the knowledge base of SLTE has greatly expanded to include such topics as teacher cognition, teacher identity, reflective practice, teacher research, narratives and teacher self-development, teacher expertise, teacher emotions, teacher immunity to name but a few. For language teachers, SLTE serves as a bridge to what is known in the field with what is recommended that teachers implement in the classroom and as one scholar has recently noted, it does this through the people we educate as second language teachers.

This Special Issue on second language teacher education (SLTE) seeks research papers on any aspect of SLTE that are original and cover second language teacher education and or development from the teacher educator perspective and/or from the preservice or inservice teacher perspective.

Proposals in the form of a 300-500 word abstract are due no later than February 1, to Thomas S.C. Farrell, Applied Linguistics Dept, Brock University, Canada (tfarrell@brocku.ca) by e-mail attachment in MS Word format. Successful proposals will describe original data driven research, either quantitative or qualitative, with a rationale for the research and with specific research questions posed and a clearly described design for data collection and analysis.

*This Special Issue was initially scheduled for November 2018, but the high number of submissions has forced us to revise the date.