摘要：I would like to start by thanking the editors of the European Educational Researcher for inviting me to provide the first editorial in their journal. I collaborated with Dr.NuriBalta (executive editor) and colleagues on a project on the acquisition of Turkish by Kazakh learners. The resulting paper (Dewaele, Özdemir, Karci, Uysal, Özdemir & Balta, 2019) offered a new language combination in a field where a large majority of papers focus on English as a Foreign Language. It is notoriously difficult to pick up new trends in language education and applied linguistics. It is a little bit like trying to distinguish a network of footpaths in misty conditions in order to find the one that leads to the mountain top. The view is always incomplete, the ones that seem to be pointing in the right direction might veer off behind the next boulder, and the largest path with most walkers might be interrupted by a landslide, forcing people to scatter and find alternative paths. There is inevitably a belief of researchers that the path they are on is trendy and original. Only years later will this belief be dis/confirmed when a tally can be made through citation indexes of the popularity of that particular path.
