EDITORIAL WELCOME FOR VOLUME 3 ISSUE 2 (OCTOBER 2009)
Three years have passed since our beloved colleague Eva Bernat, Associate Editor of our journal wrote and published her editorial welcome to our first issue in 2007. And we are now presenting you the second issue of our third volume. Although three years have passed, our passion in reaching our colleagues through our journal has not changed a bit.
On behalf of our Editorial Board, I am delighted to present the new issue of Novitas-ROYAL (Research on Youth and Language). This issue could only have been possible thanks to the efforts of our reviewers who have done their best to improve the quality of the papers submitted. In fact, I have to confess that we feel a bit overwhelmed with the number of the papers submitted this year which has made our task even more difficult.
With this issue, our acceptance rate has dropped down to numbers below 20 percent. We are deeply grateful for all of the authors who have submitted their papers without whom, our efforts could have been useless. We kindly ask those authors whose work are not published in this issue to submit their future work for consideration.
In his welcoming message published in our previous issue, my colleague and friend Olcay Sert had written that the impact of our journal was increasing as could be seen in the increasing number of abstracting and indexing agencies accepting Novitas-ROYAL. I am happy to share the news that a new agency, Tübitak-ULAKBIM has decided to accept Novitas-ROYAL in the highly respected “Database of Social Sciences” after their vigorous two-year review of our growing work. We thank Tübitak-ULAKBIM for their continuing and diligent work with journals in the region which contributes to the quality of the journals reviewed. Hence, with our growing responsibility in mind, I would like to inform you that Novitas-ROYAL is looking for reviewers who are willing to read the papers submitted to the journal. Please feel free to inform us about your willingness in being a part of our Editorial Board.
We have six research articles published in our new issue. Nuray Alagözlü and Şener Büyüköztürk (Başkent University, Turkey) take pragmatic comprehension as the recognition of speech acts and conversational implicatures and compare pragmatic comprehension levels and the performances of students in oral and written production. In the second paper, Erin Bidlake (Newcastle University, UK) investigates learner experiences using a CALL software package designed for self-instruction. In the third paper, Ahmet Çekiç from Selçuk University (Turkey) shares his experimental research study on American and British accents in foreign language teaching. The fourth paper by Anne De Cort (University of Antwerp, Belgium) presents a socio-cultural analysis of Belgian and Malaysian print advertisements and tries to reveal how implicit messages are conveyed. In the fifth paper, Filiz Yalçın Tılfarlıoğlu and Emrah Cinkara (Gaziantep University, Turkey) explore the self-efficacy level of students in relation to their academic success in English and some demographic variables. From another corner, in the final article of this issue, our colleagues Abbas Zare-ee and Mohammad Taghi Farvardin (University of Kashan, Iran) focus on the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of L1 and L2 writing samples of Iranian university learners of English as a Foreign Language to determine the differences between the two.
Winter has come to the northern hemisphere and a new year is coming. We wish to meet you in our upcoming issues.
Arda ARIKAN, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
Hacettepe University , Ankara, TURKEY