Carta da Editora

Abstract

Editing an academic journal involves, besides the writers who provide the content, an editorial board, a panel of reviewers, editing and proofreading professionals. But keeping a journal within the deadlines depends largely on the work of the referees. So I would like to start the Editor's letter by thanking our group of referees who have taken their precious time to make it possible for us to release this issue before the end of the semester. Our group of referees is made up of important and busy researchers and they have been responsible for not only selecting the high-quality research reports and essays to be published in our journal but also for providing authors with insightful and constructive comments. This issue offers our readers ten articles and one book review. Sardinha presents a methodology for finding metaphors in corpora; Dota analyses some news from The New York Times about president Lula; Tafner tells us how Portuguese as a second language textbooks work with verbal forms to express futurity; Souza analyses narratives of learners of Portuguese as a foreign language to understand motivation and autonomy and Miccoli presents a sound reflection on experience as a research construct in foreign language teaching. Then come two articles on self-assessment, one by Silva, Bartholomeu and Claus, and another by Vidal. Cruz presents a state-of-art review on the terminologies and definitions proposed for "intelligibility" in the last 50 years; Mejia et al explore issues related to foreign language teacher formation in Mexico and Fogaça and Gimenez discuss the relationship between foreign language teaching and society from a political and philosophical point of view. A review closes this issue presenting a book on Genre studies, edited by Meurer, Bonini and Motta-Roth. I close this letter with good news. From now on you can also read this journal on the web. We will keep the printed format, but old and new editions will also be offered in pdf format. Visit our website at http:// www.letras.ufmg.br/rbla/.