English Language Teaching

About English Language Teaching

Overview

English Language Teaching (ELT) is an international, double-anonymised peer-reviewed, open-access journal published monthly by the Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) in Canada. It was started in 2008. Its print ISSN is 1916-4742 and its online ISSN is 1916-4750, the pair printed on its own published articles, recorded in its stored Journals World record and confirmed in its OpenAlex source record. The journal publishes original research that advances theoretical development and practical innovation in the teaching and learning of English around the world, accepting empirical studies, theoretical analyses and pedagogical investigations situated in diverse English-as-a-second-language and English-as-a-foreign-language contexts — in the field's standard abbreviations, ESL and EFL.

The journal's own summary organises its scope into three major fields: ELT theories and pedagogical practices, ESL and EFL teaching research, and English language topics connected with those fields. Within that frame it has built, over more than a decade and a half of monthly publication, one of the largest open archives in its subject area: by volume 19 the journal was publishing through 2026, individual articles carry DOIs in the publisher's 10.5539/elt series, and every published article is freely available online under the open-access licence stated in the article — published versions show the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0) on the article itself. For teachers, teacher educators and applied-linguistics researchers, that combination — monthly frequency, full open access, and a scope centred on classroom English teaching rather than on theoretical linguistics alone — defines the journal's place in its field.

A naming caution is essential for anyone searching for this journal, because its title is also the generic name of its entire field. Several completely different journals carry near-identical names: English Teaching and Learning is a separate Springer journal with different ISSNs, Teaching English Language is a separate Iranian journal with different ISSNs, and the long-established Oxford University Press journal in the same field is titled ELT Journal. None of those is this journal. The identity of the CCSE title is fixed by its publisher and its ISSN pair — Canadian Center of Science and Education, 1916-4742 and 1916-4750 — and any citation, metric or indexing claim that cannot be tied to those ISSNs should not be attributed to it. This profile is careful throughout to report only figures verified against that ISSN pair.

History and Development

The Canadian Center of Science and Education founded the journal in 2008, as part of a broad programme of open-access journals published from Canada for an international authorship. The timing placed it inside the rapid expansion of English language teaching as a global research area: English instruction was growing across East and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, universities in those regions were building English departments and applied-linguistics programmes, and their staff needed international, English-medium, open-access outlets in which classroom research from EFL contexts could be published and read without subscription barriers. The journal's archive reflects exactly that authorship — studies of learners and teachers in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kuwait, Indonesia and many other EFL settings appear throughout its volumes, alongside work from ESL contexts in English-speaking countries.

Publication has been monthly from the journal's own journal data — frequency: monthly, started: 2008 — and continuous: volume numbering reached volume 19 in 2026, with issues announced through that year and an e-version-first workflow under which articles appear online ahead of their issue's completion. Article-level DOIs in the 10.5539/elt form (for example, 10.5539/elt.v12n1p98 and 10.5539/elt.v8n1p83 for articles in volumes 12 and 8) show a registered, citable record at article level across the archive. The journal's published workflow has also become more formal over time: its current journal pages describe a defined paper-selection and publication process, from acknowledgement of submission within one to three working days, through initial editorial screening and double-anonymised external review, to editorial decision, revision, acceptance, proof approval and online publication as the version of record — the process described in detail in the peer-review section of this profile.

The journal's history also includes the ordinary corrections of the scholarly record, and one documented episode is worth stating plainly because it illustrates how that record works. In 2010 the journal retracted an article published that June; the retraction notice, and subsequent reporting of the correspondence around it, were criticised at the time for giving little explanation. Authors and readers citing older material should therefore do what they should do with any journal: check the current status of a specific article before relying on it. A retraction, openly recorded, is part of a functioning scholarly record, and the lesson of the episode for this journal — as reporting at the time argued — is that retraction notices should state their reasons fully.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal describes its core scope as three major fields, and its published contents let each of them be described concretely.

ELT theories and pedagogical practices. Work on how English should be taught: approaches and methods, curriculum and materials, classroom techniques, and the integration of new practices into established teaching. A representative published study integrated critical-thinking tasks into a genre-based approach to foster English learners' intercultural communicative competence — theory, pedagogy and classroom outcome in a single design, which is characteristic of this strand.

ESL and EFL teaching research. Empirical research on the teaching and learning of English as a second or foreign language: learner performance, classroom processes, teacher practice and programme evaluation in specific national and institutional contexts. The journal's experimental literature includes, for example, a controlled study in which Moroccan EFL learners taught writing with integrated critical-thinking skills significantly outperformed a comparison group in argumentative writing — evidence quality, credible support for conclusions and logical flow all assessed — while the authors themselves noted attainment fell short of mastery within the short training period. That combination of a clear design and a candid limitation is a fair model of what the journal's empirical strand publishes.

English language topics in teaching and learning. Research on the language skills and systems learners must acquire — reading, writing, speaking and listening, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation — studied as teaching problems. The journal's review literature includes, for example, a review of Chinese English learners' prosodic acquisition, synthesising some fifteen years of work on stress, rhythm and intonation and deriving learning strategies for a difficulty rooted in the difference between a syllable-timed first language and a stress-timed target language. Skill-specific and learner-population-specific work of this kind is a mainstay of the journal.

Across the three fields, recurring themes include critical thinking in EFL reading and writing, co-teaching in the EFL classroom, technology and social media in language learning, teacher beliefs and identity, assessment, and intercultural competence. The journal accepts three broad kinds of contribution, in its own terms: empirical studies, theoretical analyses and pedagogical investigations, in diverse ESL and EFL educational contexts. Manuscripts that are purely theoretical linguistics with no teaching or learning connection, literature studies with no language-teaching dimension, and general education research in which English learning is not the subject fall outside that frame and belong in sister or neighbouring journals — CCSE itself publishes adjacent titles in English linguistics and in English language and literature studies for exactly those neighbouring territories.

Peer Review and the Publication Process

The journal's current published workflow is unusually explicit, and prospective authors should read it as the operative description of what will happen to a submission. The journal states that it normally acknowledges receipt of a submission within one to three working days. The editorial office then conducts an initial assessment of completeness, relevance to the journal's aims and scope, originality, ethical compliance, reporting quality and conformity with essential submission requirements; a manuscript may be returned or rejected without external review when it clearly does not meet those requirements, and if another CCSE journal appears more appropriate, the office may offer a transfer — with the explicit guarantee that no manuscript or submission information will be transferred without the authors' consent.

Manuscripts that pass screening are evaluated through double-anonymised peer review by at least two independent external reviewers with relevant expertise, and the journal is careful to state that editorial screening is not counted as external review. It is equally candid about the limits of anonymisation: complete anonymity cannot be guaranteed, because author identity may be inferred from preprints, citations, datasets, conference presentations or subject matter. The review process normally takes approximately four to ten weeks, varying with reviewer availability, manuscript complexity, revision requirements and ethical or technical checks.

Reviewer recommendations are advisory; the editor decides, considering the reports together with the manuscript's scholarly quality, relevance, originality, methodological or analytical validity, ethical compliance and reporting quality. Possible decisions include acceptance, minor revision, major revision, rejection with an invitation to submit a substantially revised manuscript as a new submission, or rejection. Where revision is requested, authors must submit the revised manuscript with a point-by-point response explaining how each comment was addressed or why a suggested change was not made, and a revision request does not guarantee acceptance. Article processing charges are requested only after final acceptance, in accordance with the fee information published on the journal website — a sequencing point authors should note, because it distinguishes the journal's stated practice from outlets that charge at submission. Following acceptance, production, the corresponding author's approval of page proofs and completion of applicable administrative requirements, the article is published online as the version of record, freely and immediately available under the open-access licence stated in the article.

The current article processing charge itself should be taken from the fee information on the journal's official website at the time of submission. No figure is quoted in this profile, because the charge is a publisher-set operational detail that changes over time and was not confirmed from the journal's own current fee page in the sources consulted; authors budgeting for submission should read that page directly rather than relying on any third-party listing.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

The journal's scale is best documented from its OpenAlex source record, fetched directly for ISSN 1916-4742 and repeated with the same result: 3,082 works, 46,630 citations, an h-index of 79 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.57, under host organisation Canadian Center of Science and Education, country Canada, and the ISSN pair 1916-4742 and 1916-4750. Those figures describe a large, heavily used open-access archive: an h-index of 79 built since 2008 reflects how widely the journal's classroom-focused studies are picked up by later researchers in the same EFL and ESL contexts, where a published study from a comparable setting is often the most directly usable prior work a new researcher can cite.

Two cautions govern every other metric claim about this journal. First, the title-collision problem described in the overview is severe in aggregator data: CiteScore, SJR and quartile figures circulating under the words "English language teaching" frequently belong to the Iranian Teaching English Language, to Springer's English Teaching and Learning, or to other near-namesakes, and this profile does not import any such figure for the CCSE journal. Where a metric matters — for an appointment, a promotion case or an institutional list — it must be looked up by ISSN in the source database itself, not by title words in a search engine. Second, a search of the DOAJ directory for both of this journal's ISSNs returned no record at the time of this verification, even though the journal is genuinely open access — its articles are published free to read under a Creative Commons licence stated on the article. A directory result, positive or negative, should therefore be treated as a directory fact to recheck at the time it matters, and not as a substitute for examining the journal's own articles, licences and workflow, which are openly inspectable.

Within its field, the journal's standing is that of a high-volume, practitioner-relevant research outlet: monthly, international in authorship, centred on classroom English teaching, and freely readable by the teachers and researchers — many of them working in institutions without large subscription budgets — who form its natural audience. Its most useful function in the research ecosystem is circulation: studies of EFL and ESL teaching published here are accessible to precisely the readership most likely to apply and to cite them.

Who Should Publish and Read Here

The journal fits applied-linguistics and language-education researchers, teacher educators and classroom teachers conducting research on English teaching and learning, particularly empirical work situated in a defined ESL or EFL context: a learner population, a programme, a teaching intervention or an assessment practice that readers in comparable settings can learn from. It fits theoretical and pedagogical work that develops how English should be taught, and skill-focused research — on reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation — framed as a teaching and learning problem. Doctoral and early-career researchers in EFL contexts will find its archive both a literature base and a realistic model of publishable study design at classroom scale.

It is a weaker fit for theoretical linguistics without a teaching connection, for literary study, for general education research in which English learning is incidental, and for work whose context cannot be described clearly enough for international readers to judge its transferability. Authors should also weigh the journal's breadth: a highly specialised psycholinguistic experiment may reach its intended specialists more precisely in a narrower journal, while a classroom study of real teaching is exactly the contribution this journal exists to circulate.

How to Verify and Submit

Verify identity by ISSN and publisher before anything else: English Language Teaching, Canadian Center of Science and Education, print ISSN 1916-4742, online ISSN 1916-4750, monthly, started 2008, DOIs in the 10.5539/elt series. Do not rely on title words alone in any database, because the near-namesake journals described in this profile will contaminate title searches. Before submitting, read the journal's own published workflow and fee information on its official site, prepare the manuscript for double-anonymised review by at least two external reviewers, describe the study's context, participants, instruments and ethics arrangements completely enough for those reviewers to judge validity, and be ready, if revision is invited, to answer every comment point by point. After acceptance, expect the charge request to follow the journal's stated sequence — after final acceptance — and check the page proofs carefully, because the online version is the version of record and is immediately and freely available to the journal's worldwide readership.

One further practical feature deserves note for readers planning a literature search: because the journal has published monthly since 2008, its archive is best searched by concept and context together — a skill or problem paired with a learner population or country setting — rather than by browsing issues, and its article-level DOIs make every study found that way straightforward to cite, retrieve and verify independently of any single database or search engine.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes English Language Teaching? The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE), in Canada. The journal started in 2008 and appears monthly.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 1916-4742 and online ISSN 1916-4750, printed on its published articles and confirmed in its OpenAlex source record.

Is it peer-reviewed and open access? Yes to both. It is a double-anonymised peer-reviewed journal, reviewed by at least two independent external reviewers after editorial screening, and its articles are published freely available under the open-access licence stated in the article — CC BY 4.0 appears on published versions.

How long does review take? The journal states that review normally takes approximately four to ten weeks, and that a submission is normally acknowledged within one to three working days.

When is the article processing charge requested? Only after final acceptance, according to the journal's published workflow. The current amount is given in the fee information on the journal's official website.

Is it the same as ELT Journal or English Teaching and Learning? No. Those are different journals from different publishers with different ISSNs. Identify this journal by CCSE and the ISSN pair 1916-4742 / 1916-4750.

What do its metrics show? OpenAlex records 3,082 works, 46,630 citations and an h-index of 79 for the title. Aggregator figures found by title words often belong to near-namesake journals, so look metrics up by ISSN.