Current issues in English language education: Perspectives, directions, and innovations

Rationale behind the themed issue of the IJAL
In the past seven years, since the first publication of the Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics (IJAL), there has been an upsurge of publications by Indonesian authors on all topics related to English Language Education. The journal has had an impact on ELT in Indonesia and beyond. This is indicated by its extremely high citation rate on Google Scholar. It also has a comparatively high Scopus citation rate for a Humanities and Social Sciences journal (Lukman, Rianto, Hakim, Nadhiroh, & Hidayat, 2018). Indonesian scholars in ELT have comprehensively described their unique context and challenges and provided solutions relevant to ELT from primary level to high school, higher education and vocational education. There have also been a number of innovations from interesting local ways of using educational technologies to bringing local contexts into the classroom and interacting in effective ways with local communities. However, Indonesian ELT scholarship has not only had a local focus. Instead, as described by sociologist Roland Robertson, there has been a “glocolization” or a “co-presence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies” (1995, p.16).