WELCOMES
It is time to welcome new members to the SSLA family. First and foremost, I want to welcome two new associate editors: Jill Jegerski and Stuart Webb. Jill is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois. She is recognized internationally for her research on bilingualism, psycholinguistics, and Spanish as a heritage language. Stuart is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario. He has established an international reputation for his research on vocabulary acquisition, particularly on incidental vocabulary learning.
SSLA has been fortunate to have had excellent editorial assistants. We have added a new editorial assistant, Ayşen Tuzcu, a graduate student in the Second Language Studies Program at Michigan State University. She will continue to work with Lizz Huntley and Hima Rawal, who have been editorial assistants since 2015 (Hima Rawal) and 2018 (Lizz Huntley).
A final welcome goes to six new editorial board members representing five countries: Ali Al-Hoorie (Jubail Industrial College, Saudi Arabia), Paola Escudero (University of Western Sydney, Australia), Okim Kang (Northern Arizona University, USA), Kevin McManus (Penn State University, USA), Elke Peters (KU Leuven, Belgium), and Yuichi Suzuki (Kanagawa University, Japan). We are grateful that they have agreed to contribute to the future of SSLA.
FAREWELLS
Greg Keating has served as associate editor since 2015. Over the past years, he has done an extraordinary job of taking manuscripts from submission to, in many cases, publication. He looks at every article assigned to him with a keen critical eye. His comments are always perceptive and his suggestions to authors have been central to maintaining the high quality of the journal. As editor, I have been grateful for the care that he has taken with each and every article assigned to him.
As we move to shorter-term editorial board appointments, we acknowledge the long-term commitments (in some cases more than 15 years) to the journal by Peter Robinson, Margaret Thomas, and Richard Young. They have done countless reviews for the journal and have made numerous excellent suggestions over the years. I thank them for their service and recognize their contributions to SSLA.
A TRIBUTE TO MIKE LONG
This is not the place to acknowledge Mike’s incredible contributions to the field; they are many and have been foundational to the establishment of SLA as a viable area of research. He is unique in having established/influenced numerous areas of research, including input/interaction, task-based language teaching, needs analysis, and age effects, to name a few. But, at this point I want to acknowledge his many contributions to SSLA. He has served on the editorial board since 1985 and his contributions have been enormous. I recall sitting with him at many editorial board dinners at conferences and being impressed with his keen understanding of the field, encyclopedic knowledge, and ability to make useful suggestions about the direction of the journal (and not to mention, his political acumen). As a reviewer, he was critical and supportive at the same time. It is rare to see this combination in one individual. Mike, you are already missed and I want to express my deep appreciation for your devotion to SSLA.
