In This Issue doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.238884 & With this issue we mark the end of the first year of our co-editorship of TESOL Quarterly To say it has been an interesting year would be a gross underrepresentation of what we’ve experienced On the technical side there has been the full-scale transition to our online editorial management system, which, with the expert technical support we have received, has occurred quite smoothly Along with this transition, there has been an intriguing affective outcome of which we both have become mindful In the traditional print-based system, communication between editors, authors, and reviewers was more direct and more personal Manuscripts really were sent to an editor; invitations to review manuscripts came directly from editors to the reviewers, leaving space for personal remarks and appeals if so desired By contrast, manuscripts are now sent to a system, not to an individual editor, and review invitations, along with thank you messages to reviewers, are generated automatically by the system This shift to the online system has allowed for the kind of efficiency that is crucial to running a journal like this one, where hundreds of manuscripts arrive per year and over a thousand review invitations are sent, but we have received some interesting and thought-provoking push-back from reviewers and authors who have been troubled by the impersonal nature of the communication that is part and parcel of an online system In response to these concerns, we have made an effort to monitor these automatic communications more closely and personalize them to the extent we can We are convinced, however, that what might have been lost in the way of a more personal touch is more than compensated for by the ease and speed with which authors, reviewers, and we, the editors, can now communicate with each other International participation in the submission and review processes has definitely been facilitated by the web-based system Moving to what might be called the content side of the journal, we have found ourselves wrestling with some challenging issues One of those is the role or importance of empirically based research articles as compared to other kinds of full-length manuscripts, such as what are often referred to as thinkpieces, a genre that includes but goes far beyond literature review in challenging us to rethink our taken-for-granted theoretical and methodological stances A closely related issue is what constitutes quality research We are acutely aware of the fact that the types and quality of research we publish in TQ send a message to the larger TESOL community as well as to those in closely related communities We also know that new approaches to research continue to emerge, just as new perspectives develop, particularly as the world of research is changed by the increasing diversity of the researchers who produce it In the early days of TQ, research came only from researchers located in a few parts of the world, and from a relatively TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 44, No 4, December 2010 643 small group of people who generated it Nowadays it comes from nearly every part of the world, as those who review it There is a fascinating multivocality at work as the range of those who produce and evaluate research increases steadily There are more voices than ever before commenting, in manuscript reviews, on what constitutes appropriate research for TQ, just as there are more authors from ever-widening backgrounds shaping or challenging notions of research as they generate and share that research with us As editors, we welcome the opportunity to participate in this global reconsideration of what research is and in the negotiation that plays out between writer aims and reader expectations in every manuscript review process From a research perspective, this issue of TQ is an especially exciting one in the way it represents the diversity found in the research submitted to the journal in terms of methods employed and those who are the participants in the research process Junko Yamashita and Nan Jiang included research participants at universities both in Japan and the United States in their examination of performance on a phrase acceptability judgment task that presented the participants with congruent and incongruent English-language collocations, that is, those with and without counterparts in the language learners’ L1, in this case, Japanese Interestingly, both the EFL and ESL participants made more errors with incongruent than with congruent collocations, though ESL learners made fewer than EFL learners, suggesting that greater exposure to the L2 can indeed be an advantage Yamashita and Jiang observe that instructors familiar with their students’ L1 may be particularly well poised to predict which L2 collocations will prove to be especially challenging While also focused on lexical issues, Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez’s study differs from that of Yamashita and Jiang in goals, methods, and participants Mancilla-Martinez employed a quasi-experimental design, with treatment and contrast groups consisting of Spanish-speaking students at an urban elementary school in the United States, to determine what difference explicit academic vocabulary instruction might make After a 20-week intervention, the treatment group outperformed the contrast group in word knowledge and also notably improved as writers While Mancilla-Martinez is careful to avoid suggesting a simple (or any) causal relationship between literacy gains and her intervention, she does note that her study points to the likely value of sustained vocabulary instruction accompanied by productive use of what is taught Kumiko Fushino did set out to determine causal relationships in her study of factors affecting group work in an EFL setting With the help of structural equation modeling, Fushino found evidence in the questionnaire responses of over 700 Japanese university students that learners’ communication confidence and their beliefs about group work affect their willingness to communicate in L2 group work Fushino offers a number of practical suggestions for those eager to foster learner belief in the value of group work and to reduce learner apprehension about ability to effectively communicate with fellow L2 students Informed by critical discourse analysis, Trevor Gulliver examined immigrant success stories in 24 textbooks used in language classes for adult 644 TESOL QUARTERLY newcomers in Canada Gulliver found in these texts little to no attention given to social justice issues that affect immigrants—issues that, Gulliver observes, there must be awareness and consideration of if critical citizenship is the goal Gulliver encourages us to make space in classrooms and instructional materials for a much greater range of immigrant experiences and voices An issue that Lucie Moussu feels is in need of greater attention is student attitudes towards teachers they perceive to be native or nonnative speakers of English, especially with respect to how those attitudes may change over time To explore this issue, Moussu administered a questionnaire at the beginning and end of a semester to students at 22 intensive English programs in the United States Her findings suggest that instructor nativeness or nonnativeness plays a relatively minor role in student views of their teachers, and that whatever student attitudes are initially, they are subject to change over time with greater exposure to the instructor Like Moussu, Deyuan He is interested in attitudes toward nativeness, but his focus is on EFL student and teacher perceptions of the need for learners to develop nativelike English language proficiency Employing a questionnaire and matched guise task to solicit the views of approximately 1,000 students and teachers at four universities in China, He also sought to triangulate his study by interviewing over 100 informants Among his many interesting findings, He discovered that Chinese students were more accepting of ‘‘China English’’ pronunciation than their teachers were The author hopes that future research will focus on codification of China English, which could, in turn, lead to greater educational acceptability of a new EFL instructional model The Forum section revolves around a full-length article published by Kieran Andrew File and Rebecca Adams in a previous issue of TQ (volume 44, number 2, June 2010) In their article, File and Adams described a study of vocabulary learning which, in their view, demonstrated the superiority of form-focused instruction over incidental learning In the Forum section, Beniko Mason and Stephen Krashen challenge File and Adams’ assertion based on their own analysis and interpretation of the File and Adams data In their view, the File and Adams data actually support the value of incidental learning File and Adams reply to this response with their own re-examination of their data While acknowledging some gains through incidental learning, they maintain that form-focused instruction was more effective In the Teaching Issues section, Meg Gebhard and Kerry Anne Enright discuss academic literacy learning and instruction in the United States from two different directions Gebhard looks at how teacher education programs can benefit from an approach to teacher preparation rooted in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) She explores the efforts of three teacher education programs promoting the SFL approach and shows how they’ve achieved success in preparing teachers to help L2 learners better understand the ways in which academic language operates in texts assigned in their classes Enright’s contribution focuses on academic literacy pedagogy in subject matter classrooms (as opposed to ESL classes) and argues against the skillsbased approach promoted by the national No Child Left Behind legislation She reviews several studies which adopted a broader view of academic literacy IN THIS ISSUE 645 instruction incorporating linguistic, social, political, and cultural aspects of language, and demonstrates the value of employing this broader repertoire of literacy practices and perspectives in the teaching of academic literacy The Brief Reports and Summaries section contains two research-oriented contributions In theirs, Tim Murphey and Joseph Falout describe an approach to qualitative research called Critical Participatory Looping (CPL), which operates as an alternative to the conventional focus on member checking, in which individual participants in a study review data and interpretations about them By contrast, CPL is a group-oriented approach constituting various feedback loops The authors illustrate its use in two of their own studies in Japan Robert C Johnson and M Gregory Tweedie focus on their own research concerning the development of phonemic awareness They describe a study set in schools in rural parts of Malaysia and show how an intervention program called the Early Literacy Project, which emphasizes direct instruction in phonemic awareness, contributes to the development of literacy among young EFL learners The Book Review section contains six reviews of books on a wide range of topics The reviewers (Kathryn Bartholomew, Sonoko Tsuchiya, Sean Barnette, Mina Monfared, Todd Ruecker, and Duff Johnston) discuss books covering the experiences of and challenges faced by Christian educators and critical English language educators (edited by Mary Shepard Wong and Suresh Canagarajah); the literacy practices and academic socialization experiences of international graduate students (edited by Christine Casanave and Xiaoming Li); connections between technology and practice in second language writing instruction (Joel Bloch); Generation 1.5 students in college composition classes (edited by Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau); a new notion called Global Hip Hop Nation, which explores the globalization of language and culture in a global Hip Hop nation (edited by H Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook); and language policy, culture, and identity within Asian contexts (edited by Amy Tsui and J W Tollefson) Finally, we want to draw attention to a call for papers for our 2012 special issue This will appear on the TESOL Quarterly website in December Diane Belcher and Alan Hirvela Editors 646 TESOL QUARTERLY