Message from Outgoing Editor, Professor Jack C. Richards

On behalf of SEAMEO-RELC, I would like to thank Professor Jack Richards for his involvement in the RELC Journal over the years. Readers may not be aware, but Jack was the very first editor of the RELC Journal when it was first launched in 1970. Since then, he has contributed to SEAMEO-RELC and the journal significantly and generously by teaching on some of our Diploma courses, providing scholarships for teachers from the region to attend courses in Singapore, authoring articles for and guest editing several RELC publications. Through Jack's wide international network, the journal has been able to attract authoring and guest editing contributions from many renowned scholars over the years. All of this has increased the journal's standing so much so that last December, we were finally accepted into the SSCI and awarded an Impact Factor. We express our deepest gratitude to Jack Richards for guiding the RELC Journal over the past 50 years and encouraging countless authors and editors to greater academic heights.

Marie A. Yeo

The current year 2021 has been another stellar year for the RELC Journal. Building on our achievement of attaining an Impact Factor, we started with the April 2021 Special Issue: Teaching Pronunciation, guest edited by Martha C. Pennington. Martha's editorial, “Teaching Pronunciation: The State of the Art 2021,” provided new perspectives on what, how and why to teach pronunciation. We then had the August 2021 Special Issue: English as a Medium of Instruction in Transnational Higher Education (EMI-TNHE), with Peter de Costa, Curtis Eneix-Green and Wenjing (Wendy) Li as guest editors. Their editorial, “Embracing Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Access in EMI-TNHE: Towards a Social Justice-Centered Reframing of English Language Teaching” was a timely one as issues of inclusion, equity and access have come to the fore, even in relation to vaccinations and medical care, during the current pandemic.

As we move forward to 2022, many of us have come to accept that COVID-19 will not go away anytime soon but is now endemic. In other words, it will continue to circulate throughout our communities, but its effects may become less severe. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, many learners and teachers in the Southeast Asian region have been adversely affected by school closures and travel restrictions. This has raised very serious concerns about access and equity for learners, especially those from under-resourced contexts. These changes have also put immense pressure on teachers who may find themselves having to switch back and forth from face-to-face to online, blended or hybrid modes with very little time for training and preparation. As well, the boundaries between work and home life have become blurred as many teachers find themselves working from home and often using what might previously have been personal social media platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook-Messenger for professional teaching purposes. All of this has put varying degrees of personal and mental stress on learners and teachers alike.

How can teachers and teacher educators cope in this brave new world of teaching and learning? In his article, Competence and Performance in Language Teaching, Richards (2010) lists various competences and expertise that English language teachers need. Ten years on and with COVID-19 still in sight, I wonder what additional competences teacher need in this constantly changing landscape of teaching and learning? I would argue that agility, resilience, and professionalism are three important attributes for a COVID-19 endemic world.

Despite the many challenges, TESOL professionals around the world have shown amazing agility and resilience by responding as well as we can using whatever resources we have available. For those from well-resourced contexts, we may have access to the latest technology for synchronous and asynchronous online teaching. Others may have had to resort to print materials delivered to students in their homes. Whether high-tech, low-tech or no-tech, we have used the resources available to continue to reach as many of our learners as possible. We have made mistakes, learned from them, and improved on the different modes of teaching. Apart from agility and resilience, many teachers have demonstrated great professionalism by eking out time to participate in professional development activities to develop new skills for teaching and assessing online. Many have also developed themselves professionally through research and publication.

In fact, in the past year, more and more teachers have been sharing their experiences at webinars and in publications on Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hodges et al., 2020), which is a term used to describe the “crisis-mode” of online teaching that was common at the start of the pandemic. There is now a critical mass of research on the response of the English language teaching profession to the COVID-19 pandemic, and this is summarized in the thematic review which leads this issue of the RELC Journal. As we move from ERT to principled online practice, the need to proactively prepare for future modes of teaching has become apparent. An increasingly prevalent mode is hybrid teaching, where some learners are physically present while others attend online, all during the same synchronous session. The Conversations with Experts interview gives some tips on how to prepare for and manage hybrid teaching. While it may seem that technology use has come to dominate language teaching and language teacher education, this is certainly not the case, as we still need to be guided by research from applied linguistics on the myriad of topics that are covered by the articles in this issue. Whether we are teaching in face-to-face or online spaces or both, we still need to attend to factors that influence learners such as learner needs, learner perceptions, engagement, motivation, and culture. We also need to investigate different teaching approaches, teacher identity, and teachers’ use of resources, and continue to explore teacher research and language policy, as all of these have an impact on various stakeholders in our community.

In closing, on behalf of the RELC Journal editors, I would like to thank all our reviewers for your service to the academic community by helping us to evaluate submissions and improve the quality of those selected through your detailed feedback. We also thank all our readers for your appreciation of the efforts of our authors because without your readership, we would not be able to fulfill RELC's mission of developing language education and promoting international cooperation among language professionals.

We hope that 2022 will be brighter and that it will be a year of professional growth and satisfaction for you.