I would like to begin this issue by thanking all of our readers, evaluators, authors and editorial team for their contributions to the journal throughout the year and by wishing you a very productive and rewarding 2020!

In particular, I want to thank our new team of Adjunct Editors -Ana García, Gabriel Quiroz and Wilson Orozco-, for accepting to be part of this endeavor in spite of all their occupations and multiple commitments. It has been a pleasure to have you in our team, helping with all the decisions and providing support with the million tasks that need to be completed every day. Finally, I want to thank our invited editors, Andrés Ramírez, Estela Moyano, and Jim Martin, for being willing to participate in the special issue that is coming up in January 2021: Appliable Linguistics in Language Education: SFL in Practice. We are really excited about this project and very convinced it will be of great use to scholars in the language teaching field around the world.

Next, I would like to highlight some of the achievements that this team of collaborators, and you, our readers, made possible during 2019. These achievements include the following: (a) an increase in the number of articles published per issue, for a total of 39 articles published in 2019; (b) the participation of 20 authors and 19 evaluators from Colombia, and of 28 authors and 51 evaluators from abroad; (c) the 33% increase in the number of received articles, which raised our acceptance rate to 13.5% ; (d) the publication of the first volume totally online (volume 24-3); and (e) the training of all team members in the use of the new platform OJS3, to which we will be transitioning in 2020, and which will allow us to have a more fluid communication with our readers, authors, and an easier the publication process.

Finally, I would like to present this first issue for 2020 which, as the previous one, is composed of 14 provocative articles dealing with a wide range of topics in the field of language and culture. These articles comprise five empirical studies, two case studies, two pedagogical experiences, three methodological articles, and two theoretical articles.

The empirical studies include two action-research studies (Hazaea; Ortega), one quantitative study (Rajaei, Talebi & Abadikhah), and two discourse analysis studies -one on textual discourse (Barletta, Chamorro & Mizuno) and one on multimodal discourse (Baeza, Vasquez-Rocca & Mangui).

The two action-research studies by Hazaea and by Ortega show how EFL teachers can make use of unconventional pedagogies such as CDA and social justice education to promote critical intercultural awareness among university students and improve their critical reading skills (Hazaea), and to raise awareness about social issues such as bullying among high school students (Ortega). The quantitative study by Rajaei, Talebi & Abadikhah, on the other hand, debunks the assumption that collaborative approaches are always more effective by showing how the use of collaborative approaches did not make a difference in terms of reading comprehension or attitude towards it among Iranian EFL learners. Finally, the discourse and multimodal analysis studies, reveal how linguistic resources can be used to not only express graduation, namely force, in academic articles (Barletta, Chamorro & Mizuno) and appreciation, judgement and affect in political discourses (Baeza, Manghi & Vásquez-Rocca) but also to construct an authorial voice (Barletta, Chamorro & Mizuno), and most importantly, to perpetuate the status quo and align with neoliberal discourses about education (Baeza, Manghi & Vásquez-Rocca).

The two case studies, coincidentally, are very similar in that they are both multisite studies which explore the experiences of Colombian in-service EFL teachers within the National Program of Bilingualism. Using narratives provided by school and university teachers (Sierra-Ospina) and the results of focus group interviews and surveys to teachers from five urban schools (Sierra & Echeverri), the studies underscore some of the faults in the professional development initiatives carried out by the national government and propose a series of actions that can be taken to improve these initiatives.

Contrary to the case studies, the pedagogical experiences present the results of two very different interventions which were carried out in two distinct contexts: a research club for students doing a licensure program in foreign languages at a Colombia university (García, Rolong-Gamboa & Villar), and a non-formal adult education program for government officials working with speakers of Haitian creole in Chile (Sumonte). In spite of these differences, they both show how the interventions contribute to the development of (intercultural) communicative competence, proving that it is possible to use very different innovative ways to achieve this objective, namely: the planning, production and edition of an academic journal issue (García, Rolong-Gamboa & Villar), and the implementation of a three-stage model in which the migrants act as linguistic mediators (Sumonte).

As for the three methodological articles by Echauri-Galván; Huertas and Garrido; and Peralta, Castellaro and Santibáñez, even though they undertake the analysis of very different data, such as children’s books (Echauri-Galván), art work (Huertas & Garrido) and undergraduate students’ interviews (Peralta, Castellaro & Santibáñez), they all present an innovative way to conduct this analysis. Echauri-Galván, for example, proposes a three-stage analytical model that allows the reader to determine the message by engaging in a fluid text-picture dynamic. Similarly, using the theory of paratranslation, Huertas and Garrido submit a series of strategies that can be undertaken to analyze the textual elements in art work when these elements are in a language different from the viewer’s. Finally, Peralta, Castellaro and Santibáñez suggest a methodology for how to conduct the analysis of argumentation in interviews.

Finally, the two theoretical articles cannot be more different in their content. Indeed, while Torralba-Miralles’ article offers different conventions and programs available for audiovisual translation and the benefits of using these, Puchmüller’s article uses a historical perspective to make a gender analysis of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Nonetheless, the two articles advance new theories about their corresponding topics which “expand and refine” our views, as all good theoretical articles should do.

All in all, the articles in this issue provide an ample spectrum of the work that is being done in relation to language and culture in specific fields such as language policy and language professional development (Sierra-Ospina; Sierra & Echeverri), language teaching (García, Rolong-Gamboa & Villar; Hazaea; Ortega; Rajaei, Talebi & Abadikhah; Sumonte), discourse analysis (Barletta, Chamorro & Mizuno; Peralta, Castellaro & Santibañez), multimodal analysis (Baeza; Echauri-Galván), translation studies (Echauri-Galván; Huertas & Garrido; Torralba-Miralles), and literature (Puchmüller).