Reviewer Guidelines

Purpose of Peer Review

Peer review is intended to assess the scholarly quality, originality, methodological soundness, clarity, relevance, and contribution of submitted manuscripts. Reviewers should evaluate whether the manuscript is suitable for publication in The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL and provide clear reasons for their recommendations.

Review comments should help authors identify strengths, weaknesses, methodological concerns, conceptual problems, presentation issues, and opportunities for improvement.

Before Accepting a Review Invitation

Before agreeing to review a manuscript, reviewers should consider whether they:

• Have appropriate expertise in the subject area of the manuscript;
• Can complete the review within the requested timeframe;
• Have no conflict of interest that could compromise or appear to compromise impartiality;
• Can maintain the confidentiality of the manuscript and review process.

Reviewers who do not have sufficient expertise, cannot meet the deadline, or identify a relevant conflict of interest should decline the invitation promptly so that another reviewer can be appointed.

Confidentiality

Manuscripts received for peer review are confidential documents. Reviewers must not share, reproduce, distribute, discuss, upload, or disclose the manuscript or any part of it to unauthorized persons.

Unpublished information, arguments, interpretations, data, methods, or ideas obtained through peer review must not be used for personal, professional, academic, financial, or competitive advantage.

Conflicts of Interest

Reviewers should disclose any financial, institutional, professional, collaborative, supervisory, personal, or other relationship that could influence their judgement.

A reviewer should normally decline a manuscript where a conflict could reasonably raise concerns about the independence or fairness of the review. If a potential conflict is uncertain, the reviewer should inform the editor before proceeding.

Assessment Criteria

Reviewers should consider the following areas when evaluating a manuscript:

• Scope and relevance: Is the manuscript appropriate for the journal and relevant to applied linguistics, TEFL, language education, or a closely related field?
• Originality: Does the manuscript provide a meaningful contribution, new evidence, a useful synthesis, or a significant theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, or practical perspective?
• Title and abstract: Do the title and abstract accurately represent the study, its methods, principal findings, and contribution?
• Introduction: Is the research problem clearly defined and appropriately situated within the existing literature?
• Research questions or objectives: Are the aims, research questions, or hypotheses clearly stated and logically connected to the literature?
• Literature review: Is the relevant literature adequately represented, current where appropriate, and critically discussed rather than merely listed?
• Methodology: Is the research design appropriate, sufficiently described, replicable where relevant, and methodologically sound?
• Participants and sampling: Where applicable, are the participants, sampling procedures, inclusion criteria, and research context adequately described?
• Research instruments: Are questionnaires, interviews, tests, coding procedures, assessment tools, or other instruments appropriately described and justified?
• Validity and reliability: Where applicable, does the manuscript provide appropriate evidence of reliability, validity, trustworthiness, or analytical rigour?
• Ethics: Are ethical approval, informed consent, confidentiality, and participant-protection procedures addressed where required?
• Analysis: Are qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, corpus-based, experimental, or other analytical procedures appropriate and clearly explained?
• Results: Are the findings clearly presented and supported by the reported evidence?
• Tables and figures: Are all tables and figures necessary, clearly labelled, understandable, and appropriately referred to in the text?
• Discussion: Are the results interpreted carefully and related appropriately to the study aims and previous research?
• Conclusions: Are conclusions supported by the evidence without unnecessary generalisation or causal claims that exceed the design?
• Limitations: Are important limitations acknowledged appropriately?
• Implications: Are theoretical, pedagogical, methodological, or practical implications justified by the findings?
• References: Are the references relevant, traceable, appropriately cited, and prepared in accordance with the journal's APA reference style?
• Language and presentation: Is the manuscript written clearly and professionally enough for its academic argument to be evaluated?

Reviewing Research Methodology

Reviewers should assess whether the methodology is suitable for the questions being addressed. Methodological criticism should focus on issues that materially affect the validity, reliability, interpretation, or reproducibility of the research.

Reviewers should distinguish between genuine methodological problems and alternative methodological preferences. Authors should not be required to adopt a reviewer's preferred method when the method used in the manuscript is scientifically appropriate and adequately justified.

Reviewing Qualitative Research

For qualitative studies, reviewers should consider the appropriateness of the research design, participant selection, data collection, reflexivity, coding or interpretive procedures, transparency of analysis, evidential support for themes or claims, and overall trustworthiness of the study. Reviewers should not evaluate qualitative work solely according to criteria designed for quantitative research.

Reviewing Quantitative Research

For quantitative studies, reviewers should consider the appropriateness of the design, sampling, measurement instruments, statistical assumptions, analytical methods, effect estimates, confidence intervals where appropriate, interpretation of statistical significance, and consistency between the reported data and conclusions.

Reviewing Mixed-Methods Research

Mixed-methods manuscripts should be evaluated both for the quality of their individual qualitative and quantitative components and for the extent to which those components are meaningfully integrated to address the research questions.

Reviewing Literature Reviews and Systematic Reviews

Reviewers evaluating literature reviews, systematic reviews, scoping reviews, bibliometric studies, or meta-analyses should consider the clarity of the review question, search strategy, database selection, inclusion and exclusion criteria, screening procedure, transparency of study selection, quality assessment where appropriate, synthesis methods, and whether conclusions follow from the reviewed evidence.

Tables, Figures, and Supplementary Material

Reviewers should confirm that tables and figures are relevant to the argument, accurately described, appropriately numbered, and referred to within the manuscript. Reviewers should identify unnecessary duplication between the text, tables, and figures, as well as inconsistencies between numerical values presented in different parts of the manuscript.

References and Citation Practice

Reviewers should identify missing literature only when it is directly relevant to evaluating or improving the manuscript. Reviewers should not request unnecessary citations, excessive citations, or citations primarily intended to increase citations to themselves, their collaborators, a particular journal, or institution.

Where a reference appears inaccurate, untraceable, irrelevant, or inconsistent with the claim it is intended to support, reviewers should bring this to the editor's attention. References should follow the journal's required APA style.

Ethical Issues and Research Integrity

Reviewers should alert the editor confidentially if they identify possible plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabricated or falsified data, inappropriate authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, unethical research, citation manipulation, or other potential publication misconduct.

Reviewers should not investigate alleged misconduct independently by contacting authors or their institutions. Concerns should be reported to the journal so that they can be handled through the appropriate editorial process.

Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Peer Review

Reviewers must protect the confidentiality of unpublished manuscripts. Manuscripts, figures, supplementary files, unpublished data, or substantial portions of submitted material should not be uploaded to publicly accessible generative AI systems or external AI services where confidentiality, data retention, copyright, or intellectual property protection cannot be assured.

Reviewers remain personally responsible for the accuracy, fairness, originality, and scholarly quality of their review reports. Artificial intelligence must not replace independent expert evaluation.

Writing the Review Report

A useful review report should normally include:

• A brief overall assessment of the manuscript;
• Identification of its principal strengths;
• Clear explanation of major concerns that affect validity, interpretation, originality, or publication suitability;
• Specific recommendations for revision;
• Minor comments concerning clarity, organisation, terminology, referencing, tables, figures, or presentation;
• A publication recommendation submitted through the journal system.

Comments should be sufficiently specific for authors and editors to understand the concern and, where possible, how it could be addressed.

Major and Minor Comments

Major comments should address issues that materially affect the scientific or scholarly quality of the manuscript, including research design, conceptual framing, analysis, unsupported conclusions, missing essential information, or serious inconsistencies.

Minor comments may address clarity, terminology, organisation, formatting, individual references, presentation, or other issues that can be corrected without fundamentally changing the study.

Constructive and Respectful Review

Reviewer comments should be professional and respectful. Personal criticism, insulting language, discriminatory comments, sarcasm, or hostile remarks are not acceptable. Criticism should be directed toward the manuscript and its scholarly content rather than toward the authors.

Reviewer Recommendations

Reviewers may normally recommend one of the following outcomes:

• Accept: The manuscript is suitable for publication with no substantive revision required.
• Minor Revision: The manuscript is potentially publishable after limited corrections or clarifications.
• Major Revision: Substantial changes are required before the manuscript can be reconsidered.
• Reject: The manuscript has fundamental problems that are unlikely to be resolved through revision or is unsuitable for the journal.

The final editorial decision rests with the editors of The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL. Reviewer recommendations are an important part of the decision-making process but are advisory rather than binding.

Review Timeline

Reviewers are requested to complete their reports within the deadline indicated in the review invitation. If additional time is required, the reviewer should contact the editorial office as early as possible. The journal normally aims to complete the peer-review process within approximately three months, although the actual timeframe may vary according to reviewer availability, manuscript complexity, and the number of revision rounds required.

Revised Manuscripts

Reviewers may be invited to assess a revised manuscript. In such cases, reviewers should focus on whether the authors have adequately addressed the substantive concerns raised in the previous review and whether the revisions have introduced any new problems.

Recognition of Reviewers

The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL values the voluntary scholarly contribution of its reviewers. Reviewer confidentiality will be maintained in accordance with the journal's single-blind peer-review policy unless a reviewer has expressly agreed to another form of recognition permitted by the journal.

Reviewer Agreement

By accepting a review invitation from The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, reviewers agree to maintain confidentiality, disclose relevant conflicts of interest, provide an independent and constructive scholarly assessment, respect applicable publication-ethics standards, and submit the review within the agreed timeframe.