The Language Teacher invites reviews of books and other educational materials of interest to language teachers, including textbooks, teacher resource books, academic titles, and websites or other online resources. Contact the Publishers' Review Copies Liaison for material listed in the Recently Received column and the Book Reviews Editor for unlisted material. Review articles that treat two or more related titles are particularly welcome.
Membership in JALT is not required to submit a review.
What a review is
A book review is an informed evaluation of the material by an experienced teacher. Reviews should describe what the material is, who it is for, what it sets out to do, and how well it does it, with specific examples drawn from the material itself. Give a balanced account of strengths and weaknesses, and use the first person where appropriate.
Reviewers are welcome to draw on their own teaching experience, including any use they have made of the material in their own classes. Classroom use is not required, and reviews of classroom materials are not evaluated on whether the material was trialed.
Reviews and student data
Book reviews must not directly report data collected from students. This includes survey or questionnaire results, student feedback or quotations, test scores or other performance data, class profiles, and observations presented as findings about particular students or classes. Such reporting is research involving human participants and falls under the JALT Publications Statement of Ethics and Malpractice, which requires institutional ethical approval where applicable, informed consent from participants, guardian consent for minors, and anonymity. The Book Reviews column is editorially reviewed, not peer reviewed, and is not the venue for that work.
A reviewer's own judgment based on classroom experience (for example, that a unit's listening tasks are pitched too fast for lower-level learners) is welcome; reporting what students said or did is not.
TLT welcomes submissions of classroom-based evaluation of materials that includes student data as either Feature Articles or shorter Readers’ Forum articles. These will be peer reviewed and must meet the ethics requirements in full. See submission details here for more details.
Professional standards
Do not review material in which you have a personal or financial interest of any kind, including material you have authored, edited, or contributed to, or that is published by an organization you work for. Your review must be your own work. References to other work that support your evaluation are welcome.
Format
Begin with a header in the following form:
Title of Book [Author(s) or Editor(s). Publisher, Year. Number of pages, e.g., pp. x + 134. Price. ISBN.]
Reviewed by Your Name, Affiliation
Reviews should be up to 750 words, excluding the header and references. Follow APA 7th edition for in-text citations and references, and give page numbers for any material quoted from the book under review. Include only references that support your evaluation; a short list is fine.
Submission
Send your review as a Word document (not PDF) to the Book Reviews Editor at jaltpubs.tlt.reviews@jalt.org. Please proofread carefully before sending.
The editors may ask for revisions before a review is ready for publication and reserve the right to make minor changes for length, style, and clarity. A first draft is normally expected within three to four months of receiving the materials; if you cannot meet a deadline, let the editor know as soon as possible. Reviews not completed within one year may be withdrawn and the materials recalled.
You will be notified of the planned publication date once it is set. Reviews are published in print and online at jalt-publications.org.
