Dear Readers,
Welcome to the November 2020 issue, a blockbuster, with 12 feature articles. Apart from one special issue, this is the greatest number of articles that TESL-EJ has ever offered in a single issue since its inception in 1994.
Thanks to both an increase in submissions and the diligence of our co-editors, we have been able to shorten our “throughput” from submission to publication. Of the 12 articles offered here, seven of them were submitted during the 2020 calendar year, with one excellent article racing from submission to publication in less than two months.
In the past few months we have experienced a sudden increase in our submission rate, which currently stands at almost one submission per day. While quite a few submissions never reach the review stage, there are many that do. Particularly with the extra work created by the pandemic, our co-editors have not been able to take on all of the manuscripts that require the selection of reviewers and management of the vetting process. Thus, I am very happy to announce that we have found two new co-editors, Jeremy Phillips, who teaches at the Institute for Tourism Studies in Macau, and Brent Green, who is located at Brigham Young University, Hawaii. On the flipside of the coin, however, we are grateful for the assistance of Eli Hinkel of Seattle Pacific University, who has stepped down from the co-editorship but remains on our Board of Editors. We also thank Iryna Lenchuk of Dhofar University, who helped out for one year before becoming overwhelmed by her school responsibilities.
In yet another development, TESL-EJ Managing Editor, Seyed Abdollah Shahrokni, has now set up a Google Scholar page for us which shows our statistics over the years. Surprisingly, our book reviews occupy the top 23 places in the listing. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the books, themselves, are often Googled, at which point our review pops up.
The TESL-EJ team would also like to thank the reviewers of the articles that have merited inclusion in this issue: Ali Derakhshan, Aurelio P. Vilbar, Behzad Mansouri, Bernard Susser, Christina Nicole Giannikas, Colin William Campbell, David Berry, Ender Velasco, Erhan Aslan, Erin N. O’Reilly, Flora Debora Floris, Gina Paschalidou, Heidi E Vellenga, Hooman Saeli, James Meriwether Hall, Jared James Gerschler, Jolanta Hudson, Khang Duy Nguyen, Laura Anne Schildt, Md Kamrul Hasan, Mehrdad Mohajerpour, Onur Ergünay, Rachael Ruegg, Reda Elmabruk, Shannon M. Hilliker, Theresa A Antes, Thinh Hoang and Ufuk Atas. There are many others who reviewed articles that did not meet our standards, which we would also like to collectively thank.
Thomas N. Robb, Ph.D.
For the editorial team