JALT Conference Proceedings - JALT2012

JALT2012—Making a Difference: Conference Proceedings

Dear JALT members:

We are very pleased to announce the publication of the JALT2012 Conference Proceedings (JCP). There are 75 papers, chosen from more than 100 submissions, with topics ranging from psycholinguistics to sociolinguistics, from student development to teacher development, from techno-oriented teaching skills to the art of teaching, from quantitative to qualitative studies, and from English to other language teaching settings. Indeed, it produces a great sense of satisfaction as well as pride to see how diverse, deep, and broad the contexts of the JCP publications have become over the years.

First of all, we would like to thank the authors who submitted their articles and worked hard to bring their products to fruition. Without their dedication to language teaching and their contributions to our field through the JCP, this whole process would never have started. Next, we must express our heartfelt gratitude to the team of reviewers, content editors, and copy editors, more than 75 volunteers who worked with the authors over a period of time, sometimes even sacrificing holidays and setting aside their personal needs.  Then there are a number of others who worked behind the scenes to make this publication possible. They may remain anonymous but we definitely owe them a deep appreciation. Copy editors were mentioned above; this is a new position we introduced this year to further facilitate the editing process. They specialized in the mechanical aspects of writing and thereby helped to free content editors to concentrate more on the “meat.” The system seemed to have worked effectively and we definitely plan to recommend its continuation next year.

Last but not least, we have also incorporated a new section called “Selected Papers.” This is in response to requests over the years that there be more recognition of outstanding JCP papers. For this section, five papers were selected through consultation and voting by the editorial board. We salute the authors and commend their works for the high quality of research and writing. We hope that their publications will be duly recognized in other realms of academia. This special recognition to a limited number of selected papers, however, by no means diverts our attention from all the JCP papers. Rather, we expect that the entire JCP will contribute to our language teaching field by stimulating research and encouraging classroom innovation and collaboration in the years to come.

Nozomu Sonda & Aleda Krause
JALT2012 Conference Proceedings Editors-in-Chief