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  • Editorial / Éditorial
  • Larry Vandergrift and Laura Collins

This issue begins with the winner of our Best Graduate Student Paper Award for 2007. Congratulations to Talia Isaacs, from McGill University, on her winning article titled 'Towards Defining a Valid Assessment Criterion of Pronunciation Proficiency in Non-native English-Speaking Graduate Students.' This mixed-methods study, based on Talia's MA thesis, first synthesizes how intelligibility has been defined and measured in the pronunciation literature, and then describes an experiment to empirically validate a measure of intelligibility at the word level, in the academic domain. We thank the members of the CMLR Board of Directors for their help in choosing the winning paper.

In addition, we offer four other interesting articles. The first is by Kristin Snoddon, noteworthy in that it is the first article on American Sign Language in the history of CMLR. This article presents an applied linguistics perspective on early [End Page 549] intervention policies and programs for deaf children. Yuko Watanabe draws on sociocultural theory to explain interaction patterns of adult ESL learners with higher- and lower-proficiency peers during pair problem solving. Daniel Daigle, Isabelle Mathieu, and Isabelle Montésinos-Gelet report a study on the effect of grapheme/phoneme relationships for speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese learning to read and write in a beginner-level French class. Finally, in our Focus on the Classroom article, Mary Grantham O'Brien and Richard Levy present the results of a study on the use of a virtual world to increase students' awareness of the target culture.

We would also like to draw your attention to two Calls for Papers in this issue. First of all, we invite submissions for the 2008 Best Graduate Student Paper Award competition. The competition is open to students who are currently registered or who graduated during the previous academic year; papers should be submitted no later than October 31, 2008. Please check the announcement on page 636 for details. Second, we are calling for papers for our [End Page 550] 2009 special issue on Heritage, Minority, and Indigenous Language Education in Canada. Guest editors Patsy Duff and Dunanduan Li will be accepting submissions until October 31, 2008. Please see the announcement on page 692 for more details.

The end of another volume year is an appropriate time to thank all those who contribute to the publication of CMLR. We would like to thank everyone at UT Press, particularly Rachel McArthur and Sylvia Hunter, who ensure that CMLR continues to be a high quality journal that is published on schedule. We work very closely with them and are dependent on their support.We are also grateful to the Official Languages Support Program Branch of the Department of Canadian Heritage for their generous financial support year after year. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the time, expertise and insight our manuscript reviewers contribute to the publication of CMLR (please see the list of reviewers on page 715). We thank them for the scholarly insights, detailed feedback and mentorship they provide to authors and the expert advice they provide to us as editors [End Page 551] in carefully selecting the scholarship we publish. Our reviewers play a critical role in ensuring the success of CMLR as a reputable international journal. In fact, CMLR has recently been nominated by the European Science Foundation for inclusion in the 'Initials' List (Linguistics) of the European Reference Index for the Humanities based on the following criteria: 1) a genuine, varied and regular international cohort of contributors and readership; 2) consistently high-quality scholarly content; and, 3) broad consensus within the field concerning international status and visibility.We could not do this without the dedication of our staff, the generous support of our funders, and the outstanding contributions of our reviewers. Thank you!

Dans ce numéro, vous trouverez, en premier lieu, une étude qui a remporté le Concours du meilleur article par un étudiant diplômé pour l'année 2007. Nous présentons toutes nos félicitations à Talia Isaacs, de l'Université McGill, lauréate de notre concours pour son article intitulé « Towards Defining a Valid Assessment Criterion of Pronunciation Proficiency in Non-native English-Speaking Graduate Students ». Talia...

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