We are delighted to welcome you to the 2018 issue of the Annual Review of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. This volume includes four research articles and two literature review articles. The scope of the studies presented here is extensive which illustrates how diverse is the research carried out by postgraduate students at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. Indeed, this issue includes papers from students in phonetics and phonology, education, applied linguistics and cross-cultural communication. Here we present an overview of the papers included in this issue.

Dan McCarthy offers an overview of the features of a new electronic tool for studying pronunciation Youglish.com. It is a large free database of recordings of speakers of English that allows its users search for pronunciation of words across different varieties of English. The author highlights the potential of this website to be used as research tool for lexicographers of pronunciation. The article evaluates the tool and discusses its strengths and weaknesses. This article is of interest to phonetics and phonology students and to those interested in sociolinguistics.

Dhiaa Kareem examines the representations of Saddam Hussein in the US press during the Iraq-Iran war. By employing critical discourse analysis together with corpus linguistics tools, the author provides an extensive overview of the discursive strategies used in the media reporting to build up a negative representation of Hussein. The study is based on a large corpus of data (7.5 million words) and both quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrates how media discourses evolved over the years. This study is of interest to anyone interested in merging critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics as well as those interested in media studies and politics of the Middle East.

Ibrahim Selman Baktir evaluates the effectiveness of School-Parent associations in Turkey by analysing policies, government documents and statistical data. He discusses how the financial resources of these associations are distributed and suggests improvements in how these can be used more efficiently for various purposes and beyond just school infrastructure support. The article also provides an extensive overview of educational finance policies in Turkey. This article will be of interest to anyone researching educational policies and finance.

Simin Ren employs conversation analysis to study the strategies of repair in English language teaching classrooms in the US and China. The author maintains that these strategies differ across in these two contexts. This study showed that other-initiated self-repair is the most commonly used repair technique in the classroom. Conversation analysis findings were triangulated with quantitative analysis of online group discussion. This study is of interest to applied linguistics and TESOL students of ECLS and all those who use conversation analysis in their research.

Hanh Pho takes a critical look on theories and models of cultural adaptation and identity in cross-cultural transition. Such review is necessary as the existing literature is based on the research of refugees and immigrants integration whose experiences differ from those of international students. This article synthesises and evaluates some influential theories and conceptualisations of cultural identity and adaptation in cross-cultural transition and their limitations.  The author suggests that the research on sojourners and student sojourners can inform and enrich both sub-fields of study of cross-cultural transition. This paper will interest a broad readership of MA and PhD students in cross-cultural communication.

Kubra Kirca Demirbaga compares the Montessori’s and Vygostsky’s theories, two prominent educators of the first half of 20^th century who had an immense impact on how we understand child development and learning. The author looks at their social and political backgrounds to explain how their positionalities developed. The article looks at where both theories stand in terms of learning process, the structure of the classroom, the curriculum contents, the roles of student and teacher in education. This paper will be of interest to all those researching education.

ARECLS Journal has been the academic voice to postgraduate students for more than 10 years and hope that it will continue its work in the future thanks to the support of staff and PGR community of our school. We would like to thank all the contributors for submitting their work for publication in ARECLS. Special thanks go to the editorial board and anonymous reviewers for their work on this issue.

We hope you will enjoy the 15^th issue of ARECLS and look forward to hearing your feedback. We also would like to encourage students and members of staff to contribute to ARECLS in 2019.

Hanna Sliashynskaya (Senior Student Editor) and Peter Sercombe (Editor-in-Chief)