Many of us involved in the Nagoya JALT Chapter have been daydreaming about starting our own journal for years now. We have been talking about it for close to a decade now it seems. So, it is pretty exciting to see it finally becoming a reality. We hope that it will be successful and that we will be able to publish further issues for years to come.
To be honest, it has been a rough year for most of us. Nothing seems to be going right in 2020 so far and there is no telling when we will get back to the good old days of day-to-day normalcy. Our ways of teaching have suddenly changed, and we have been forced to adapt to new learning environments due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. During these past several months, as difficult as they have been, however, several people worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help this inaugural issue of the Nagoya JALT Journal come to life. Many people gave their valuable time to write or review papers, edit, proofread, design layouts, and so much more. In every sense, this first issue of our journal is a product of the Nagoya teaching and researching community. It is a patchwork created by the hardworking and dedicated teachers of our city. Although this journal and the idea behind it began in Nagoya, Japan, we hope that teachers and academics from around the world read it and decide to send us submissions of their work as we publish future issues.
We hope you enjoy this journal and that you get something out of it that you can take into your classrooms or use in your own research. Please build on the ideas you read about in this journal and pay forward what you can. If you read something that interests you, maybe contact the paper’s author and pitch ideas on how you could collaborate on research together. Building relationships and learning from one another is one of the most important things we can do as teachers and researchers.
Lastly, I would like to thank the people of our great city who came together to make this journal a reality. Most importantly though, I would like to thank Naoya Shibata for his hard work and commitment to this project. Without him we would probably still be sitting around discussing how great it would be to start our own journal some day.
Joseph C. Wood
Nagoya JALT President
- June 26th 2020