The year 2022 was very productive for the Profile journal in terms of visibility and recognition for its scientific quality. Added to the classification in Scimago Journal Rank (Quartile 2 in the area of Education and Quartile 1 in the Linguistics and Language area), on July 15^th the Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation granted the journal the Ángela Restrepo award, which honors excellence in the fields supervised by the Ministry. This award has been created to make visible the academic work that researchers and institutions carry out to contribute to strengthening Colombian science, technology, and innovation. The Profile journal was acknowledged in the category of excellence in scientific publication.

Note. Text in the photograph: Ángela Restrepo Award for Excellence in Science, Technology, and Innovation. Category: Excellence of Colombian scientific journals, 2022.

This is just another incentive for our editorial work which, for over 22 years, has aimed at providing the national and international academic communities with a quality scientific publication. We would like to thank the invaluable support from our team of reviewers and members of the Editorial Committee, whose contributions make the edition and publication of the journal possible. We also commend the interest our authors and readers show towards the journal as an ideal means to access relevant academic and scientific knowledge on English language teaching and learning, research, and teacher education.

In this issue, we are very pleased to share with you 15 articles. Twelve correspond to the section Issues from Teacher Researchers, two to the section Issues from Novice Teacher- Researchers, and one to the section Issues Based on Reflections and Innovations. Overall, the articles in this issue come from eight countries: Argentina, Australia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Iran, Mexico, and Turkey.

Furthermore, the topics discussed by the authors concern teacher training and teacher professional development, teachers’ identities as well as their pedagogical beliefs, language assessment, mentoring, collaboration and networking, language teaching methods (including online practices), and the development of language skills (writing, listening, reading, listening, and pronunciation). Research methods include observational techniques and introspective methods in individual and multiple case studies, all under a qualitative paradigm. These topics have been studied at pre- and in-service teaching levels.

The section Issues from Teacher Researchers opens with a contribution from Colombia in a joint effort of three researchers. José V. Abad, Jennifer Daniela Regalado Chicaiza, and Isabel Cristina Acevedo Tangarife present a case study that analyzes pedagogical relationships and teacher identities in research incubators. The result of this study led to the creation of a theoretical model that describes pedagogical relationships in research education around the axes of power and affect.

The second article is authored by Eva Estefania Trujeque-Moreno, Georgina Aguilar-González, and Fátima Encinas-Prudencio These Mexican scholars dedicated their work to mapping English language teacher-researchers’ collaboration and networking practices in their professional paths. Three dimensions were examined: teaching, organization, and research. The findings revealed that each professor-researcher’s agency was directly related to her or his capitalization of diverse strategies in each dimension and how this, in turn, configured their engagement in the English language teaching community and/or other communities.

Our third article comes from Argentina. Authors Mercedes Pérez Berbain, Lidia Payaslian, Anabella Sauer Rosas, Belén García, and Agustina La Porta discuss the impact of mentoring on English language teachers on a qualitative research design with four mentors and seven mentees. Mentees were found to improve their teaching practice and develop their professional knowledge. The study argues that mentoring can offer all English language teachers the possibility to build knowledge with other teachers, from their own experiences, and for other teachers and educational stakeholders.

The first article from Iran comes from the hand of Maryam Honarparvaran and Mohammad Saber Khaghaninejad, both in representation of Shiraz University. Their comparative study aimed at showing the factors that demotivate language professionals in contexts such as high schools and universities. The results indicated that, among the demotivating factors, the most prominent ones were financial issues, students’ demotivation, facilities and course-books, and neglecting teachers for educational decision-making.

Next, Turkish authors Meryem Özdemir-Yılmazer and Yonca Özkan discuss a case study connected to a model of dynamic assessment in L2 classrooms with two English teachers. In this model teachers are expected to correct errors and simultaneously provide prompts for students to fix the problems. Results showed that while one of the teachers reconceptualized her role as a provider of graduated prompts, the other teacher resisted adopting any roles that dynamic assessment requires. The study implies careful consideration of personal and contextual factors shaping teachers’ assumptions to make a change in teacher practice.

Our sixth contribution to this section comes from Chilean authors Marco Cancino and Paloma Ibarra. They focused their attention on EFL secondary education teachers’ perceptions towards using Online Student Response Systems (OSRS). Findings revealed that EFL teachers regard OSRSs components as helpful and engaging as well as drivers and obstacles in relation to OSRSs use. The pedagogical implications of the study call for proper training for EFL teachers before using OSRSs, and the benefits in accepting the gamified aspects of OSRSs as a significant feature that can support learning.

Mónica Abad, from Ecuador, establishes a connection between EFL teachers’ beliefs about listening and their actual listening instructional practices. Fifty EFL teachers participated in a mixed-method study that aimed at providing empirical evidence of listening teaching practices and determining teachers’ beliefs about listening. Results evidenced that instructional practices emphasize task completion rather than listening development, are oriented towards the product rather than the process, and lack decoding development.

The eighth contribution is from Australian author Michael Burri. In his article, he compared L2 teachers’ English pronunciation practices with the perceptions of their learners. The findings show that the learners have a strong desire to be taught and improve their pronunciation, and that the teachers’ provision of oral corrective feedback meets the students’ preferences. However, the use of mostly teacher-centered techniques and subsequent lack of opportunities for communicative pronunciation practice suggest some incongruity between teachers’ practices and students’ perceptions.

The second contribution from Iran presents the research work of Vahid Rahmani Doqaruni. The research centers around the functions of teachers’ narratives in EFL classroom contexts. The purpose of the study was to find out what functions these narratives serve. Three functions of narratives emerged, namely, moral, pedagogical, and intercultural.

The second Colombian contribution is a joint effort between two universities, namely the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, in Bogotá and the Purdue University in West Lafayette in the USA. Authors Diana Marcela Lizarazo Pereira, Felicia Roberts, and Ricardo M. Tamayo aimed to show the influence of emotion and word frequency in first and second language processing. The analysis of 100 participants’ (50 L1 English speakers and 50 L2 English speakers) reaction time to vocabulary prompts showed that L2 English speakers process words slower than L1 English speakers do. L1 English speakers processed positive words faster than negative words, but L2 English speakers displayed a reversed pattern, which indicates L2 emotional attenuation for negative words.

The third Iranian article is authored by Reza Rezvani and Parisa Miri. The area of interest of these researchers is academic writing, and in particular how graduate students of TEFL manage their citing in academic texts. In this research, 16 graduate English language teaching students were given two summary writing assignments from published articles, one irrelevant and one pertinent to source-text use. The students participated in retrospective interviews about their source-text use after completing the tasks. Recursive thematic data analysis indicated that while they were inclined towards more direct source-text use in the first summary, they opted for more indirect and academic source-text use that involved their personal contribution and interpretation in the task.

The section closes with a case study conducted by Luis Hernando Tamayo Cano, Andrés Felipe Riascos Gómez, and Jorge Eduardo Pineda Hoyos. These Colombian researchers carried out a needs analysis conductive to the design of an English blended learning program from the perspective of teachers and administrators. Findings revealed the need to make a considerable investment in new personnel and e-infrastructure. Likewise, students’ context should be considered to design EFL blended programs. Additionally, teachers and students should be offered ICT and methodological professional development. Finally, the program should carefully balance the integration of face-to-face and online modalities.

Section 2, Issues from Novice Teacher-Researchers, includes two articles. The first article is a contribution from the novice teacher-researcher, Marcela Ovalle Quiroz, together with her tutor Adriana González. They explore the imagined identities and the imagined communities of Colombian English language teachers in their investment and in their professional development. Findings suggest that English language teachers are invested in their professional development if they may develop three imagined identities-as proficient English speakers, ELT experts, and ICT competent users-and their affiliation to an imagined community of “bilinguals.”

The second article of this section is a joint effort between the novice teacher researcher Juan Diego Gálvez and his tutor, professor Marcela Del Campo. This team aimed at strengthening the reading competence in English through the application of a reading comprehension module. The action-cycle study was carried out at a public high school in Colombia. The results show that the implementation of the material had a significant impact on the development of literacy competence, which suggests the material could be used as a tool for supporting English language learning.

Our issue closes with the section Issues Based on Reflections and Innovations with the inclusion of one article. María Eugenia Guapacha Chamorro and Orlando Chaves Varón did a review of EFL writing studies in Colombia between 1990 and 2020. They synthesised 63 research reports regarding authorship, publication year, focus, methodology (context, participants, research paradigm, design, data collection methods and analyses), validity, reliability, ethics, findings, limitations, and further research. The findings reveal that EFL writing is a developing research area in Colombia, characterised as a predominantly qualitative inquiry of adult writing instruction and learning at universities. From the findings, they propose a research agenda and some guidelines for authors and reviewers to enhance and evaluate research reports.

We hope you find this issue useful for your teaching practice and projects. We also invite you to spread the word about our publication so that other teachers learn about the opportunities we provide to get acquainted with the studies conducted by scholars in different parts of the world.