From the editors.

We hope that you have had a good start to the New Year, 2009. In 2008, Language Learning & Technology experienced another record-breaking year in terms of submissions to the journal: 150 articles from 25 countries were submitted.

It is our pleasure to introduce this special issue guest edited by Trude Heift on "Technology and Learning Grammar," the 5th special issue in our "Back to Basics" series. Trude has done an outstanding job with her special issue and has been an excellent Associate Editor of the journal.

In addition to the four articles, we are pleased to include our regular, and always excellent, Emerging Technologies column by Bob Godwin-Jones, which complements the articles by discussing the latest tools and strategies for developing intelligent language tutors (ILT's). He explains how grammar exercises that focus on form need to be "integrated, intelligent, and innovative."

Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas, our Reviews Editor, has assembled three reviews (two book reviews and one software review). The first review by Lily Sorenson evaluates The Hockey Sweater CD-ROM, the English version of the French software Le Chandail de Hockey, which was previously reviewed in the October, 2007, issue of LLT (Vol. 11, No. 3). Sorenson concludes that many activities on the English version of the CD-ROM could be beneficial to (younger) students learning English, particularly those with an interest in hockey and Canadian culture, but that the main shortcoming is a "lack of adequate progression in activities from level to level and of appropriate accompanying activities for the reading passages" (p. 25).

The second review by Fei Fei of the book Teacher Education in CALL, edited by Phil Hubbard and Mike Levy, notes that the greatest strength of the book is that it provides practical information based on the authors' experiences in a wide variety of environments and countries. In addition, it discusses many issues that still need to be addressed in teacher education in CALL.

Alison Leithner reviews the book Blended Learning: Using technology in and beyond the language classroom by Pete Sharma and Barney Barrett and finds it to be potentially useful for teachers who are less experienced with employing technology in their L2 classes. She states that the authors' overarching message is that technology should be an addition to the second language classroom and should not be used as a substitute for the instructor, whether it be in EFL/ESL or any other L2 classrooms.

If you are not already a subscriber, please take a few minutes to fill out our free subscription form. This enables us to compile useful statistics about the readership of our journal.

Lastly, we would like to express our heartfelt thanks to our Managing Editor for the last three years, Hunter Hatfield. Hunter has done a superb job handling all of the correspondence among the editors, authors, and reviewers, and keeping us organized. We appreciate his great dedication to the journal and his excellent editorial talents. We wish him well as he finishes his Ph.D. dissertation. We would like to welcome Matthew Prior as Hunter's successor and look forward to working with him.

We wish you a productive year ahead and look forward to receiving contributions from all over the world and especially those dealing with L2s other than English.

Sincerely, Irene Thompson and Dorothy Chun, Editors

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