Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning (JFLTL) focuses its publication on the issues around the teaching and learning of foreign languages around the world. The area of discussion may include:

  • Teaching skills
  • Foreign language pedagogy
  • Teaching and learning strategies
  • Second Language Acquisition
  • Linguistics in the process of teaching and learning
  • The use of literary works in teaching and learning foreign languages
  • Identities in the fields of foreign language teaching and learning
  • Technology in foreign language teaching and learning

 

Section Policies

Articles

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed
 

Peer Review Process

All manuscripts submitted to Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning are subjected to a thorough screening and review process to ensure that they fit within the scope of the journal and are of sufficient academic quality and novelty to appeal to the journal's readership. The journal uses double-blind peer review, which conceals the identities of both the author(s) and the reviewers.

 

Initial Screening. A newly submitted manuscript will be reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief to ensure that it meets the scope and basic submission requirements of Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning.

 

 

 

Peer-review. If the manuscript passes the preliminary screening, it will be assigned to a handling editor, who will then send it to at least two experts in the relevant field for double-blind peer review. Manuscripts that do not pass the preliminary screening will be rejected without further consideration.

 

 

First Decision. A decision on a peer-reviewed manuscript will be made only after at least two review reports have been received. At this point, a manuscript can be rejected, asked for minor or major revisions, accepted, or recommended for resubmission for a second review process (if significant changes to the language or content are required). If the manuscript is accepted, it will be returned to the submitting author for formatting. The Editor-in-Chief will make the final decision to accept or reject the manuscript based on the recommendation of the handling editor and approval by the board of editors.

 

Stage of revision. A manuscript that needs to be revised will be returned to the submitting author, who will have up to three weeks to format and revise it before it is reviewed by the handling editor. The handling editor will decide whether the changes are adequate and appropriate, as well as whether the author(s) responded sufficiently to the reviewers' comments and suggestions. If the revisions are deemed insufficient, the cycle will be repeated (the manuscript will be returned to the submitting author once more for further revision).

 

Stage of final decision. The revised manuscript will be accepted or rejected at this point. This decision is based on whether the handling editor believes the manuscript has been improved to the point where it is publishable. The manuscript will be rejected if the author(s) are unable to make the required changes or have done so in a manner that falls short of Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning's standards.

 

Estimation time for the duration of peer review process until the manuscript getting accepted in this journal: 6-8 weeks. The whole publication process, however, may take much longer time, depending on the availability of reviewers, the amount of revisions needed, editing line, etc.

 

Publication Frequency

The journal is published twice a year on January and July.

 

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

This journal is open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to users or / institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to full text articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or author. This is in accordance with Budapest Open Access Initiative

  

Budapest Open Access Initiative

 An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact. To secure these benefits for all, we call on all interested institutions and individuals to help open up access to the rest of this literature and remove the barriers, especially the price barriers, that stand in the way. The more who join the effort to advance this cause, the sooner we will all enjoy the benefits of open access.

The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

While  the peer-reviewed journal literature should be accessible online without cost to readers, it is not costless to produce. However, experiments show that the overall costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination. With such an opportunity to save money and expand the scope of dissemination at the same time, there is today a strong incentive for professional associations, universities, libraries, foundations, and others to embrace open access as a means of advancing their missions. Achieving open access will require new cost recovery models and financing mechanisms, but the significantly lower overall cost of dissemination is a reason to be confident that the goal is attainable and not merely preferable or utopian.

To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies. 

I.  Self-Archiving: First, scholars need the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, then search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. Users then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in order to find and make use of their contents.

II. Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open access. Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish. Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.


Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. They are not only direct and effective means to this end, they are within the reach of scholars themselves, immediately, and need not wait on changes brought about by markets or legislation. While we endorse the two strategies just outlined, we also encourage experimentation with further ways to make the transition from the present methods of dissemination to open access. Flexibility, experimentation, and adaptation to local circumstances are the best ways to assure that progress in diverse settings will be rapid, secure, and long-lived.

The Open Society Institute, the foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is committed to providing initial help and funding to realize this goal. It will use its resources and influence to extend and promote institutional self-archiving, to launch new open-access journals, and to help an open-access journal system become economically self-sustaining. While the Open Society Institute's commitment and resources are substantial, this initiative is very much in need of other organizations to lend their effort and resources.

We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access and building a future in which research and education in every part of the world are that much more free to flourish.

February 14, 2002
Budapest, Hungary

Leslie Chan: Bioline International
Darius Cuplinskas: Director, Information Program, Open Society Institute
Michael Eisen: Public Library of Science
Fred Friend: Director Scholarly Communication, University College London
Yana Genova: Next Page Foundation
Jean-Claude Guédon: University of Montreal
Melissa Hagemann: Program Officer, Information Program, Open Society Institute
Stevan Harnad: Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Southampton, Universite du Quebec a Montreal
Rick Johnson: Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Rima Kupryte: Open Society Institute
Manfredi La Manna: Electronic Society for Social Scientists 
István Rév: Open Society Institute, Open Society Archives
Monika Segbert: eIFL Project consultant 
Sidnei de Souza: Informatics Director at CRIA, Bioline International
Peter Suber: Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College & The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
Jan Velterop: Publisher, BioMed Central

 

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...

 

Publication Ethics

Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning (JFLTL) puts attention on the legal standards and ethical behavior in the publishing process of an article. This is why JFLTL finds it significant to inform the publication ethics for every party including the authors, reviewers, editors, and the publisher itself. It is hoped that those parties realize the importance of the code of conduct before they submit and accept the manuscript. It is aimed as a prevention of ethical misconduct for all parties involved in the publication process. The statement of publication ethics is based on COPE’s Core Practices (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices).

Duties of Authors

Authors who submit the manuscript to JFLTL have such commitment to publish only original materials, i.e. material that has neither been published elsewhere, nor is under review elsewhere. If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they are required to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions beyond those of the previous work.

Every author should be able to deliver the detail of the data precisely. There will be no tolerance towards plagiarism. Citation and quotation should be presented properly as a way of preventing such plagiarism. The data fabrication and falsification cannot be tolerated so submitted manuscripts which are found to have either fabricated or falsified experimental results, including the manipulation of images, will incur data fabrication and falsification sanctions.

The role of a corresponding author is important in contacting the editors for such retraction or correction. If it is found the errors in publication, the corresponding author has the rights to inform such mistakes to the editorial board members for such correction and/or retraction.

All listed authors must have made a significant research contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. It is important to list everyone who made a significant research contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

 

Duties of Editors

Initial screening of a manuscript is the main duty of the editors. In this manuscript’s initial screening process, the editors have the rights to accept or refuse the manuscript based on the focus and scope of the manuscript and the contents of the manuscript. The editors should only consider the manuscript’s content without considering the author’s gender, race, religions, citizenship, ethnic origins, or political views. The editors should be able in keeping the secrecy of the manuscript and it is not allowed to share the document to other people who are not involved in the publishing process. The editors do not have the rights to use the data in the manuscript for their own research without the author’s agreement.

Selecting the peer-reviewers is the other task performed by the editors. The editors should be able to choose the reviewers with the appropriate academic background and expertise for reviewing the manuscript. In this process of selecting the reviewers, the editors need to consider the conflict of interest as well.

Editor have the rights and responsibility in the decision of accepting or rejecting the manuscripts. Whenever found such plagiarism, data fabrication and falsification, the editors have to contact the author to confirm this matter.

Duties of Reviewers

Reviewers have the significant role in the publication process of a manuscript. Right after the editors decide that a manuscript is fit enough for the journal, the reviewers are assigned to check the whole content of the manuscript.

It is a must for reviewers to give such constructive feedback related to the content of the manuscript. It should be clearly stated with such supportive theoretical arguments and references. As JFLTL applies the double blind peer review, the reviewers have no clues on the author’s identity and vice versa.

If a selected reviewer cannot manage to accomplish the task given, he/she has the rights to inform the editors to exclude from this reviewing process. Competing interest statement should be declared by the reviewers during the review process. This statement is aimed to prevent such action that the reviewers find that it causes competitive, collaborative, or other kinds of challenge towards the authors or institutions related to the paper.

Reviewers have the responsibility in giving the recommendation regarding the manuscript status to the editors. They also have to notify the editors whenever they found any kinds of fraud during the process of manuscript review. Any kinds of information related to the paper should be kept in secret and the reviewers have no rights to take any advantages of it.

 

Duties of Journal and Publisher

Publisher or journal must ensure that the editorial decision is not affected by external motives such as sources of funding or other things. The journal should make a policy that supports the development of science and protect the author’s intellectual rights. The journal has the responsibility in taking action of correction and/or retraction for the manuscript.