ISSN: 2433-5401

May 2023

The Learner Development Journal is the online, open-access journal of the JALT Learner Development SIG. Published once a year, The Learner Development Journal is devoted to practitioner-driven research, reviews and interviews exploring learner development issues in second language education.

The Learner Development Journal represents a commitment to group-based professional development and shared exploration. It provides a forum for members of the SIG and others to explore issues related to specific learner development themes in a collaborative and supportive environment. Contributors to The Learner Development Journal are encouraged to inquire into connections between practice and theory, to problematize, and to raise questions as well as provide answers about the learner development issues that interest them.

Rooted in a commitment to community, collaboration and praxis, each issue of The Learner Development Journal publishes work on a particular learner development theme that the contributors of that issue explore together, under the leadership of the issue co-editors.

Each issue of The Learner Development Journal contains 6-10 articles of varying lengths related to the common theme, reviews of key texts, an introduction written by the issue editor(s) to provide an overview and context to the whole collection of work, and a closing commentary by a key teacher/researcher in the field.

Depending on the theme of the issue, contributors are encouraged to experiment and write in different genres, such as personal narrative, extended book review, dialogic exploration, multimodal report, as well as include video and other hyperlinks in their writing.