Twenty-Five Years of Theory in the CALICO Journal

In honor of CALICO's 25th anniversary, this study looks at the presence and collocations of the term ‘theory’ across issues in 25 volumes of the CALICO Journal. Utilizing the electronic versions of articles now available to all subscribers and the built-in search engine on the CALICO website, 244 articles in which the word ‘theory’ appeared were initially identified. Of those, 78 included examples where ‘theory’ only appeared in the reference list or the author's biographical statement, leaving 166 articles to form the corpus to review for in-text examples. This paper reports on the number and types of theories identified in the corpus, noting the wide range overall but exceedingly small number of references to what could be considered native CALL theories, as well as commenting on the value and limitations of this approach for reviewing scholarly work.