Dear Readers,
Welcome to the May 2021 issue, which starts our countdown towards our 100th issue in February 2022. As you will have noticed, this is a Special Issue in honor of Dr. Zohreh P. Eslami’s long and fruitful career. She is still an active researcher, having contributed an article to her own special issue! We extend our deepest gratitude to Drs. Ali Derakhshan and Andrew Cohen for ably vetting the submissions and editing the articles in this edition.
On the Internet Column. As announced previously, Vance Stevens has retired from the editorship of the “On the Internet” column. This issue features his “swan song” — “Virtual Worlds at Virtual Conferences” which would have been virtually impossible for anyone other than Vance to write. Out of a concern that we might not be able identify a single individual with Vance’s broad outreach among Internet teachers and researchers, we welcome a team of two co-editors, Dr. Omran Ali Akasha of Washington State University and Dr. Mark Feng Teng of Beijing Normal University. We look forward to more stimulating perspectives on how the Internet affects our teaching and our students’ learning in forthcoming issues.
Our acceptance rate. In response to frequent queries concerning TESL-EJ’s acceptance rate, we have placed figures for the past four years on our “About TESL-EJ” page. The rate continues to hover between 14% and 16% thanks to the many who submit unsuitable articles, often without having read our submission information.
New Co-editors. In addition, we would also like to welcome two new members to our team of co-editors for feature articles. Kent Hill has served as a reviewer for TESL-EJ for many years and is the first Japan-based co-editor on our team. Behzad Mansouri is presently on the Media Review team but will now expand his role to include co-editing. Welcome Kent and Behzad!
TESL-EJ has published a new book, Appropriate English Teaching for Latin America, by Paul Davies. This book is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback format. 100% of profits from this book go to supporting TESL-EJ’s mission to remain free from advertising and free from subscription fees. Thank you for considering a purchase. This book is about ELT specifically in Latin America, past, present and future. You can also download a free PDF of this and other books from this website.
Our unsung Copyeditors. While their names are mentioned in the TESL-EJ Editorial Board listing, they rarely get the thanks that they deserve. Prior to each article getting passed to Aaron Campbell, who puts them up on the web, this team checks each accepted submission, improving the wording, checking that the article follows the TESL-EJ guidelines and that the references adhere to APA 7 format — often on very short notice. On behalf of the entire team, I would like to thank Jo Ann Arinder, József Horváth, Iris Levitis, Golrokh Maleki, and Anna-Karin Roo for their continued service towards maintaining the quality of our journal.
Thank you to our reviewers! The TESL-EJ team would also like to thank the reviewers of the articles that have merited inclusion in this issue: Ann E. Roemer, Aurelio P. Vilbar, Babak Khoshnevisan, Chen Chen, Ali Asiri, Elise Nicole Brittain, Gina Paschalidou, Grant Eckstein, James Meriwether Hall, Jardel Coutinho dos Santos, Lilly Yazdanpanah, Michael Joseph Ennis, Muhammed Fatih Gökmen, Pruksapan Bantawtook, Randall Davis, Seray Tanyer and Yuri Yarin. There are many others who reviewed articles that did not meet our standards, whom we would also like to collectively thank.
Thomas N. Robb, Ph.D.
For the editorial team