EDITORIAL WELCOME FOR VOLUME 1 ISSUE 2 (OCTOBER 2007)
Greetings,
We are pleased to announce the publication of the second issue of Volume 1 of Novitas-ROYAL (Research on Youth and Language). In this issue, we have a variety of articles that are theoretical as well as research-based. I would like to extend my gratefulness to all the authors who submitted their papers to our journal. Although we had to turn some of these valuable articles down for various academic and scientific reasons, we hope to have the authors’ future submissions to our journal.
Good news! We continue to grow! Although it is our second issue, we are pleased to announce that we are now indexed by Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, Index Copernicus, Electronic Journals and Newsletters, Directory of Open Access Journals and American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group. It is a small step; however, we are working hard towards enlarging our scope of agencies indexing our journal. It has also been brought to my attention that Novitas-ROYAL has been visited by thousands of researchers and practitioners from all around the world. It is encouraging to see that our journal has made it to its second issue with all this sparkling news.
We are very grateful to our International Editorial and Advisory Board members who have contributed greatly with their helpful comments and valuable reviews of new submissions. We have started to receive a great deal of articles from all around the world which makes us feel that we will need more members in our Editorial Board. Please feel free to suggest the names of those who may wish to review articles and to provide us with
insight to increase the quality of our journal.
This issue includes an array of articles covering different topics and from a variety of geographical locations, from Iran to Australia and from Sri Lanka to Turkey. Our first paper by Jamileh Rahemi investigates self-efficacy among Iranian senior high school students majoring in humanities. Rehemi’s study employs various data collection methods and shows how students’ low self-efficacy affects their EFL achievement. The next two papers deal with the subject of learner beliefs.
Hüseyin Öz reports on a large-scale study carried out among Turkish secondary school youth. The researcher’s thorough and detailed statistical analyses reveal variability in learner beliefs in terms of social and educational contexts, age, gender, and stages of language learning.
In his contribution on learner beliefs and autonomy, Sim shows how an experimental intervention study produced changes in learner beliefs and resulted in greater autonomy, as a result of an explicit and structured goal setting. From Sim’s study, we can learn practical ideas on how to promote greater autonomy among our own students.
Next, Neelakshi Chandrasena Premawardhena discusses the challenges and perspectives of introducing literature into foreign language studies at universities in Sri Lanka based on research conducted among students of six foreign languages. The author suggests remedial measures, emphasizing the importance of didactics and cultivating literature appreciation.
Finally, Ghazal Lofti presents a comprehensive review of vocabulary learning strategies and suggests a framework for training EFL learners in this area. In doing so, an account of different taxonomies of vocabulary learning strategies and a rationale for strategy training are presented. Again, practical insights can be gained for our own classrooms.
We thank, once again, all the contributors who have submitted their articles for review. We hope that you will find all the articles published informative and thought provoking. We also hope that you will submit and also invite your colleagues to submit articles to our journal in the near future.
We look forward to meeting again in April 2008.
H. Sezgi Saraç-Süzer
Associate Editor
Başkent University , Ankara, TURKEY