Notes

Emergence of E-journals and BRJ Online

As we gain more experience with BRJ Online the strengths and weaknesses of the technology become clearer. The positive aspects are obvious and numerous, but a serious problem remains: inadequate bandwidth. This manifests itself as the inability by the Web to accommodate thousands, or millions, of users simultaneously without losing efficiency and speed. Experts claim that the Web is the most revolutionary innovation since the printing press. That may be true, but it means that the earliest electronic journals “printed” on the Web must suffer the inconveniences of all early innovations. The early printing presses no doubt had comparable problems.

The greatest inconvenience of the Web is the slow download speed for pages with numerous graphics or with large graphics such as the masthead on our Table of Contents page. With this issue we give you the option of reading BRJ Online with or without graphics. If you choose the “Text Version” you will get optimum download speed but you will not see the opening masthead or the graphic icons or buttons. Any graphics embedded in the articles may also be lost. If you are accessing BRJ Online via modem you may want to try the “Text Version”, especially if you are pressed for time. If your computer is connected directly to a local area network, graphic downloads are usually not a problem and you may want to stay with the “Graphics Option." Either way, the functionality and text content remains the same. Try both options and see what works best for you.

As a future project we hope to make the journal available in CD-ROM format as well as online. If the bandwidth problem is not resolved soon, a CD-ROM version of BRJ will reduce the problem of download time.

As we weigh the future of BRJ Online, please make your needs and suggestions known for making BRJ Online more user friendly.

Submission Guidelines

The guest editors request that manuscripts submitted as feature articles be a Maximum of 30 computer-produced pages, double spaced, in 12-point type, using 8.5 by 11 inch paper, with one inch margins all around. Manuscripts for other sections may be shorter. Authors must follow the style manual of the American Psychological Association (4th edition), submit a title page, and, on a separate page, a one paragraph abstract. The full name of the author(s), conventional mail and e-mail addresses, and telephone and fax numbers must appear only on the title page.

The BRJ

The Bilingual Research Journal (BRJ) is published four times each year and covers a wide range of topics relating to bilingual education, bilingualism in society, and language policy in education. The journal contains three sections: research and essays, the traditional formats of scholarly discourse; “Research in Practice,” which documents the experience of teachers and other practitioners; and book reviews. Submissions are encouraged from scholars and practitioners in a wide range of areas: language assessment, policy analysis, instructional research, language politics, all forms of bilingual education, bilingualism and biliteracy, language planning, critical theory as applied to language issues, action research, sociolinguistics, second language teaching and learning, etc. While the BRJ accepts writings with a variety of perspectives, its sponsors believe in the intrinsic and inherent value of bilingualism, biliteracy, and linguistic democracy. We embrace the Helsinki agreements of 1975 in which 35 modern democracies, including the United States, agreed to respect the rights of language communities to maintain and use their languages of origin. We oppose “English-only” laws and other forms of linguistic restrictionism. BRJ accepts manuscripts written in English or Spanish. Articles written in Spanish need not be translated, although a two-page abstract in English is requested. The work in the practitioner section need not comport to the formats used for scholarly articles. Authors are advised that the BRJ does not accept manuscripts in hardcopy, therefore we encourage authors to prepare and submit electronic versions of their work. The preferred way to submit manuscripts is to send them as electronic “attachments” to an e-mail message addressed to brj@asu.edu. The preferred format for electronic file submissions is MS Word for Windows.

Authors who use the Macintosh platform may submit materials in one of the common Macintosh file formats. MS Word for Mac is preferred. Authors who work with other word processing programs should submit their materials in RTF, or “rich text format.” When using RTF be aware that it may not support all of the formatting instructions found in a full featured, word processing program. It is important that charts, tables, drawings, etc. be submitted in one of the standard graphics formats. Statistical graphs and charts are best in MS Excel format. Submit all graphics, including Excel graphs, using a separate file for each and annotate the entry point in the text accordingly, e.g., “Insert Table 3 here.” Manuscript files should NOT contain page numbers, headers, footers, etc., and should NOT bear the author’s name or other identity other than on the cover page. Manuscripts intended for the “Research and Essays” section should be limited to 30 pages including references. Papers intended for “Research in Practice” should be limited to a maximum of 15 pages including references. BRJ Online and its hardcopy equivalent are products of a partnership between NABE and the Center for Bilingual Education and Research (CBER) at Arizona State University. Information on subscribing to the paper version of BRJ is included under the “Subscription” button at http://brj.asu.edu. All materials published in BRJ are protected by copyrights assigned by the authors to the National Association for Bilingual Education unless otherwise noted at the foot of the first page of the printed version of an article. Because the online edition is identical in content to the hardcopy version, the online edition is covered by the same copyright protection. The usual permission to quote in reviews and to excerpt in other scholarly papers are hereby granted. For other uses please contact the editors. The editors and staff of BRJ may be contacted by addressing e-mail to: brj@asu.edu. We prefer that authors contact us by e-mail instead of telephone.